"Bother Addison!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud.
"I beg your pardon," said a voice from the depths of the obnoxious head-gear before him.
"I was thinking of the author of The Spectator. You know Johnson says we ought to give our days and nights to the study of Addison. Don't you think it would be more profitable for us to devote our days and nights to the study of Nature?"
"Undoubtedly; and especially in this short-summered region, where there are only a few months of the year in which one can pursue one's studies out of doors. My days are spent on the shore, and as for my nights—well, even at night I often go to sleep to the fancy that I am drifting over the water with just such a gentle movement as this."
"I hope," said Edward gravely, "that you have an efficient oarsman.
You couldn't row and sleep at the same time, you know."
He looked up to see if his companion was struck with the force of this observation, but although they were moving towards the east, the bonnet pointed due north. There was also a slight suspicion of the wintry north in the tone with which she replied:
"Oh, there is no labour connected with it; I am merely drifting—drifting to the Isle of Sleep."
"That is a pretty idea, but it is too lonely and listless to suit me.
I should prefer to have a young lady in the boat—and a pair of oars."
"In that case you would have to row," and, with a slightly mocking accent, "you couldn't row and sleep at the same time, you know."
"In that case I should never want to sleep. No, please, Miss DeBerczy, don't look to the north again. Every time your gaze is riveted upon that frozen region my heart sinks within me. I feel as if I were not entertaining you as well as I should."
"Oh, don't let that illusion disturb you. I have never doubted that you were entertaining me as well as you—could."
A brief silence fell upon them, broken only by the regular plash of the oars. In the young man's conversational attacks there had been nothing but a light play of sunny humour, but in this last retort of hers there was something like the glimmer of cold steel. It wounded him, yet he was unwilling either to conceal or reveal the hurt. But Helene DeBerczy had this weakness, common to generous souls, that she could not utter an ungenerous remark without suffering more than her victim. So, scarcely more than a minute elapsed before she said appealingly,
"You are not going to leave me with the last word, are you?"
"Is not that what your sex specially like to have?"
"Perhaps so. I should prefer to have the best word, and—"
"And let a certain well-known gentleman take the hindmost?" supplied the young man smilingly.
"If he only would! What a shocking thing to say, but with me it is always conscience who has the very hindmost word; and my conscience is perfect mistress of the art of saying disagreeable things. At the present moment she is trying to make me believe that I have been unpardonably rude to you."
"She is mistaken then, for even if it were possible for you to be rude, I could not fail to pardon you immediately."
"There! now you have had the best word. It is useless for me to try to say anything better than that. Perhaps the most becoming thing I could do would be to relapse into ignominious silence."
"Silence! Desolation! And with a two-mile pull yet before us! If I have had the best word you have uttered the worst one. What so terrible as silence?"
"It is said to be golden."
"And, like the gold that Robinson Crusoe discovered on his island, it is of no particular use to anyone."
"It is one of the charms of Nature."
"A charm that I have never discovered. What about the ever-present hum of multitudinous insects, the song of birds, the moan of winds, the laughter of leaping water? It seems to me that Nature is all voice."
"Then, suppose," said the undaunted young lady, lifting her languorous lids, "that we listen to her voice."
There was no answering this; but, as the bonnet now veered towards the sunny south, and the boat rounding the sharp corner of the bay abruptly turned in the same direction, the young man was surprised to find himself looking his companion fully in the face, caught in the sudden sunshine of her smile.
"I was about to remark," he said, emboldened by this token of favour, "that there is nothing I delight in so much as listening to the voice of nature—that is human nature."
The smile deepened into a rippling laugh. "I am in one of my inhuman moods this morning," she said, "but I believe my forte is action rather than speech. Let me take your place, and those oars, please."
He resigned them both, and at once; not because the unusual exertion had made any appreciable inroad upon his strength, but because he foresaw new phases of picturesqueness in the young girl's dainty handling of the oars. Nor was he disappointed. The skirt of her dress was narrow and long, beginning, like an infant's robe, a few inches below the arms, and thence descending in softly curving lines to her feet, with as little hint of rigidity or compression about the tenderly rounded waist as about the full fair throat above it. She stretched out a pair of shoes, incredibly small and unmistakably French, and bent her slender gauntleted hands blithely to their task. The newborn sweetness of the spring morning was about them. On the heavily wooded shore the great evergreens towered darkly against the sun, but its beams fell with dazzling brightness upon the meadowy undulations of the lake. Above them they heard at times the wild cry of the soaring gull, or the apparently disembodied voice of some unseen bird. Behind them they left the beautiful stretch of Kempenfeldt Bay, gleaming in the sunshine, and now they slowly ascended the waters of Cook's Bay, called after the great circumnavigator, under whom many of the naval officers who had settled in the region had served, Governor Simcoe's father, after whom the old Lac des Clies—as the French called it—had received its modern name, being a shipmate.
But, now, Helene, whose slender strength had succumbed to the difficulties of propelling their little craft, resumed her old seat, and her bonnet, like a dark lantern, sometimes allowed a charming light to be reflected upon surrounding objects, and then as suddenly withdrew it. In the blue distance, near the mouth of the Holland River, they caught the first glimpse of "Bellevue"—the home of the DeBerczy's. The long sunlit run had after all been too brief. Edward began to realize that some days might elapse before this pleasure could be repeated. He drew in his oars, and let the boat rock idly on the tide. His companion gave him an inquiring glance. "I wish," said he, "that you would do me a favour."
"Isn't that rather an extraordinary request?"
"Not at all. It is a very natural remark. It has not yet advanced so far as to be a request."
"Oh! well, of course, I can't grant what isn't a request."
"Does that mean that you can grant what is one?"
"Sometimes."
"How good of you! But, as I said before, I had only expressed a wish.
Aren't you in the least interested in my wishes?"
"If you were interested in mine you would take up those oars again."
"And thereby shorten