Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/146

Rh "I don't mean," she explained, "that I wanted you to let me win."

He laughed. "I guess I should n't think that of you."

They came out of the park and ambled along country roads, now and then making brief dashes, in which for a few seconds at least Lydia always held her own. After a time she said to him,—

"Floyd, I'm going to be very impertinent. Do you mind telling me who those people were I saw you with this morning? If you do mind, just say so."

"They were Mrs. Bell, my landlady, and her daughter," Floyd answered.

"Oh!" She meditated a moment. "That is just the kind of thing that I should have supposed you'd do."

"What?"

"Put in part of your holiday giving people a good time."

"I'm sorry I'm making such a failure of the rest of it."

"How disagreeable of you to say that! But you know what I mean. It's because I thought it was something of that kind that I dared to be impertinent. Do you mind if I say right out what I think? It makes me like you better than ever."

Floyd swept off his cap and bowed down to his horse's mane.

"Oh, you need n't take that as a great compliment," Lydia continued. "I'm perfectly illogical. Now, we both know that Stewart would no more do a thing like that than he'd—well, I give up. But he would n't do it for anything—and just that trait in him is one of the things that makes me care for him. It's so—Bostonian—and so human."

"And I'm neither Bostonian nor human," Floyd said rather sadly.

"You're certainly not Bostonian; you have some tendency to be human, but I shall always think of you as mainly heroic," Lydia pronounced; and she did not know