"No, Shiela, I haven't any griefs."
"Come to me when you have; I shall not humiliate you with words to shame your intelligence and my own. If you suffer you suffer; but it is well to be near a friend—not too near, Mr. Hamil."
"Not too near," he repeated.
"No; that is unendurable. The counter-irritant to grief is sanity, not emotion. When a woman is a little frightened the presence of the unafraid is what steadies her."
She looked over her shoulder into the water, reached down, broke off a blossom of wild hyacinth, and, turning, drew it through the button-hole of his coat.
"You certainly are very sweet to me," she said quietly. And, laughing a little: "The entire family adores you with pills—and I've now decorated you with the lovely curse of our Southern rivers. But—there are no such things as weeds; a weed is only a miracle in the wrong place.... Well—shall we walk and moralise or remain here and make cat-cradle conversation?... You are looking at me very solemnly."
"I was thinking—"
"What?"
"That, perhaps, I never before knew a girl as well as I know you."
"Not even Miss Suydam?"