"She came right towards him. 'Mr. Braybridge,' says she, 'I couldn't let you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn't choose to have these people laughing at the notion of _my_ having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn't bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they'd have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don't you see?' Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and little. He said, 'It _would_ have seemed rather absurd,' and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot."

"It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the station," Minver cynically suggested.

"Groom nothing!" Halson returned with spirit. "She paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station."

"Jove!" Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.

"She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of praise--it made Braybridge feel awfully flat--and ran back through the bushes to the boat-landing, and--that was the last he saw of her till he met her in town this fall."

"And when--and when--did he offer himself?" Rulledge entreated breathlessly. "How--"

"Yes, that's the point, Halson," Minver interposed. "Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear him out."

Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson's answer even for the sake of righting himself.

"I _have_ heard," Minver went on, "that Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other sh.o.r.e for her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself." We others stared at Minver in astonishment.

Halson glanced covertly toward him with his gay eyes. "Then that wasn't true?"

"How did you hear it?" Halson asked.

"Oh, never mind. Is it true?"

"Well, I know there's that version," Halson said evasively. "The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer--the when and the how--I don't know that I'm exactly at liberty to say."

"I don't see why," Minver urged. "You might stretch a point for Rulledge's sake."

Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive pa.s.sage of his eye over Rulledge's intense face. "There was something rather nice happened after--But really, now!"

"Oh, go on!" Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.

"I haven't the right--Well, I suppose I'm on safe ground here? It won't go any farther, of course; and it _was_ so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge--he'd followed her down to the sh.o.r.e of the lake--found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and called back: 'Never mind. I can't return for it, now.' Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and she said 'Yes,' over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and said 'No, no, you mustn't, you mustn't! You can send it to me.' He asked where, and she said, 'In New York--in the fall--at the Walholland.'

Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her--she was paddling on again--'May I _bring_ it?' and she called over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was enough, 'If you can't get any one to bring it for you.' The words barely reached him, but he'd have caught them if they'd been whispered; and he watched her across the lake, and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in time."

Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said, "Yes, that's rather nice." After a moment he added, "Rulledge thinks she put it there."

"You're too bad, Minver," Halson protested. "The charm of the whole thing was her perfect innocence. She isn't capable of the slightest finesse. I've known her from a child, and I know what I say."

"That innocence of girlhood," Wanhope said, "is very interesting. It's astonishing how much experience it survives. Some women carry it into old age with them. It's never been scientifically studied--"

"Yes," Minver allowed. "There would be a fortune for the novelist who could work a type of innocence for all it was worth. Here's Acton always dealing with the most rancid flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness and beauty of a girlhood which does the cheekiest things without knowing what it's about, and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes and fires at nothing. But I don't see how all this touches the point that Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer."

"Well, hadn't the offer already been made?"

"But how?"

"Oh, in the usual way."

"What is the usual way?"

"I thought everybody knew _that_. Of course, it was _from_ Braybridge finally, but I suppose it's always six of one and half a dozen of the other in these cases, isn't it? I dare say he couldn't get any one to take her the handkerchief. My dinner?" Halson looked up at the silent waiter who had stolen upon us and was bowing toward him.

"Look here, Halson," Minver detained him, "how is it none of the rest of us have heard all those details?"

"_I_ don't know where you've been, Minver. Everybody knows the main facts," Halson said, escaping.

Wanhope observed musingly: "I suppose he's quite right about the reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There's probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding before there's an explanation. In many cases the offer and the acceptance must really be tacit."

"Yes," I ventured, "and I don't know why we're so severe with women when they seem to take the initiative. It's merely, after all, the call of the maiden bird, and there's nothing lovelier or more endearing in nature than that."

"Maiden bird is good, Acton," Minver approved. "Why don't you inst.i.tute a cla.s.s of fiction, where the love-making is all done by the maiden birds, as you call them--or the widow birds? It would be tremendously popular with both s.e.xes. It would lift a tremendous responsibility off the birds who've been expected to shoulder it heretofore if it could be introduced into real life."

Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. "Well, it's a charming story. How well he told it!"

The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.

"Yes," he said, as he rose. "What a pity you can't believe a word Halson says."

"Do you mean--" we began simultaneously.

"That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying, people don't speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly remember it."

"Yes, but see here, Minver!" Rulledge said with a dazed look. "If it's all a fake of his, how came _you_ to have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?"

"That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I _knew_ he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn't strike you. It's the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!"

He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to say: "That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself--how much he believes of his own fiction."

"I don't see," Rulledge said gloomily, "why they're so long with my dinner." Then he burst out, "I believe every word Halson said. If there's any fake in the thing, it's the fake that Minver owned to."

THE RUBAIYAT AND THE LINER

ELIA W. PEATTIE

"Chug-chug, chug-chug!"

That was the liner, and it had been saying the same thing for two nights and two days. Therefore n.o.body paid any attention to it--except Chalmers Payne, the moodiest of the pa.s.sengers, who noticed it and said to himself that, for his part, it did as well as any other sound, and was much better than most persons' conversation.

It will be guessed that Mr. Chalmers Payne was in an irritable frame of mind. He was even retaliative, and to the liner's continued iteration of its innocent remark he retorted in the words of old Omar:

"Perplext no more with Human or Divine, To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign, And lose your fingers in the tresses of The cypress-slender Minister of Wine.

"And if the wine you drink, the Lip you press, End in what All begins and ends in--Yes; Think then you are To-day what Yesterday You were--To-morrow you shall not be less.