Alan half shook her as he drew her thin body close to him.
“Clem,” he said, “you mustn’t. Do you hear? You mustn’t. Do you think I want to go away?”
Clem stifled her sobs and looked up at him with a sudden gravity in her elfish face. She threw her bare arms around his neck.
“Good-by, Alan.”
He stooped and kissed her.
CHAPTER III
IF Alix Deering had not barked her pretty shins against the center-board in Gerry Lansing’s sailing-boat on West Lake, it is possible that she would in the end have married Alan Wayne instead of Gerry Lansing.
When two years before Alan’s dismissal Nance had brought Alix, an old school friend, to Red Hill for a fortnight, everybody had thought what a splendid match Alix and Alan would make. But it happened that Alan was very much taken up at the time with memory and anticipation of a certain soubrette, and before he awoke to Alix’s wealth of charms the incident of the shins robbed him of opportunity.
Gerry, dressed only in a bathing-suit, his boat running free before a brisk breeze, had swerved to graze the Point, where half of Red Hill was encamped, when he caught sight of a figure lying on the outermost flat rock. He took it to be Nance.
“Jump!” he yelled as the boat neared the rock.