She made no answer at first; Bayard was looking at the clam-digger, but he felt that she was looking at him. She had seated herself on the sand beside him; she was now quite her usual self; her momentary embarrassment had disappeared like a sail around the Point--a graceful, vanishing thing of whose motion one thinks afterwards. He did not suppose that she was there to sympathize with him, but he was vaguely aware of a certain unbridged gap in the subject, when she unexpectedly said,-- “You have not asked me what I came to Windover for.” “Windover does not belong to me, Miss Carruth; nor”--a ray of disused mischief sprang to his eyes. Did he start to say, “Nor you?” He might have been capable of it as far back as Harvard, or even in junior year at Cesarea. That flash of human nonsense changed his appearance to an almost startling extent. “Why now,” she laughed, “I think I could recognize you without an introduction.” “But you haven’t told me why you _did_ come to Windover.” “It doesn’t signify. You exhibit no interest in the subject, sir.” “You are here,” he answered, looking at her. “That fact preoccupied me.” This reply was without precedent in her experience of him; and she gave no sign, whether of pleasure or displeasure, of its effect upon her. She looked straight at the clam-digger, who was shouldering his basket laboriously upon his bent back, making a sombre, Millet sketch against the cheerful, afternoon sky. “I came down to engage our rooms,” she said lightly. “We are coming here, you know, this summer. We board at the Mainsail. I had to have it out with Mrs. Salt about the mosquito bars. Mother wouldn’t come last year because the mosquito bars had holes, and let in hornets and a mouse. You understand,” she added, with something of unnecessary emphasis, “we always come here summers.” “I understand nothing at all!” said Bayard breathlessly. “You were not here last summer, when I was candidating in the First Church.” “That, I tell you, was on account of the hornets and the mouse; the mouse clinched it; he waked her walking up her sleeve one morning. So we went to Campo Bello the year after. But we _always_ come to Windover.” “For instance, how many seasons constitute ‘always’?” “Three. This will be four. Father likes it above everything. So did mother before the mouse epoch. She got to feeling hornets in her shoes whenever she put them on. I wonder father never told you we always come to Windover.” “The Professor had other things in his mind when he talked to me,--second probation, and the dangers of modern German exegesis.” “Yes, I know. Dear papa! Windover isn’t a doctrine.” “I wonder _you_ never told me you always came to Windover.” “Oh, I left that to Father,” replied the young lady demurely. “I did come near it, though, once. Do you remember that evening”-- “Yes,” he interrupted; “I remember that evening.”