"I knew you as soon as I set eyes on you. You are very much taller, too.... No, we went away from Spring Pond the year after my father died."
"I see," he said sympathetically. And back into his memory flashed that scene with her by the stove in the dusky bar. And then he remembered her as she stood in her red hood and cloak staring at the closed door of the room where her dead father lay. And he remembered touching her frosty little hand, and the incident of the watch.
"I never went back there," he mused, half to himself, looking curiously at the girl before him. "I wanted to go—but I never did."
"No, you never came back," she said slowly.
"I couldn't. I was only a kid, you see. My mother wouldn't let me go there that summer. And father and I joined a club down South so we did not go back for the duck-shooting. That is how it happened."
She nodded, gravely, but said nothing to him about her faith in his return, how confidently, how patiently she had waited through that long, long summer for the boy who never returned.
"I did think of you often," he volunteered, smiling at her.
"I thought of you, too. I hoped you would come and let me teach you to sail a boat."
"That's so! I remember now. You were going to show me how."