We established between ourselves a comradeship that was for me delightfully perilous, but which—so she intimated one day, as though in warning—was only an armed neutrality. We were playing tennis in the Glenarm court at the time, and she smashed the ball back to me viciously.
"Your serve," she said.
And thus, with the joy of June filling the world, the enchanted days sped by.
CHAPTER XI
THE CARNIVAL OF CANOES
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
—Emerson.
I had dined alone and was lounging about the grounds when I heard voices near the Glenarm wall. There was no formal walk there, and my steps were silenced by the turf. The heavy scent of flowers from within gave me a hint of my whereabouts; there was, I remembered, at this point on the school lawn a rustic bench embowered in honeysuckle, and Miss Pat and Helen were, I surmised, taking their coffee there. I started away, thinking to enter by the gate and join them, when Helen's voice rose angrily—there was no mistaking it, and she said in a tone that rang oddly on my ears:
"But you are unkind to him! You are unjust! It is not fair to blame father for his ill-fortune."
"That is true, Helen; but it is not your father's ill-fortune that I hold against him. All I ask of him is to be sane, reasonable, to change his manner of life, and to come to me in a spirit of fairness."