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Rh to ask casually. Important to him as was the plan of the house, it was scarcely less essential for him to know the grounds.

She hesitated.

"I understand it's my duty at present to stay wherever I may be put; but I'd hardly run away from you while inside your own grounds."

This did not seem to be the question troubling her. "Very well," she said at last. The renewed friendliness—or the reservation of judgment of him—which she had let him see again after the interview with her father in the car the morning before, was not absent; it seemed only covered over with responsibilities which came upon her now that she was at home. She was abstracted as they passed through the hall and a man brought Eaton's overcoat and hat and a maid her coat. Harriet led the way out to the terrace. The day was crisp, but the breeze had lost the chill it had had earlier in the morning; the lake was free from ice; only along the little projecting breakwaters which guarded the bluff against the washing of the waves, some ice still clung, and this was rapidly melting. A graveled path led them around the south end of the house.

"Your father is still better this morning?" Eaton asked.

"What did you say?" she asked.

He repeated his question. Was her constraint, he wondered, due to her feeling, somehow, that for the first time in their short acquaintance he was consciously "using" her, if only for the purpose of gaining an immediate view of the grounds? He felt that; but he told himself he was not doing the sort of thing he had refused to do when, on the train, he had avoided her invi-