Merrington waited patiently for her answer. There was nothing in the bold squareness of his youthful attitude to betoken the uncertainty of mind in which she was holding him. On the contrary, he smiled with well-assumed assurance, his eyes frankly admiring in their gaze. Jacqueline spoke, suppressing partially her irritation: “How dull you must be finding the time! Do you know no one down here?” “I have forgotten time and people.” The meaning in his look and voice sent the blood to the girl’s face. She glanced about her uneasily, but Peggie’s back, and the animation with which she was talking to her friends, gave no encouragement. She turned, impulsively. “Come,” she said, imperiously enough. “We will go in the water for a little while.” To Merrington’s surprise, when he appeared on the beach in his swimming suit, Jacqueline was already in the surf. This tacit avoidance of him banished the smile from his lips for a moment as her more positive combativeness had not been able to do. That he was really in love at last, Merrington knew beyond the possibility of a doubt. He knew it, because in all the twenty-six years of his petted life he had never experienced anything like this peaceful elation underlying all the tremor of his senses. Jacqueline disdained him; he recognized that fact, but it caused him no more genuine annoyance than the breaking upon him, when he entered the surf that was now rolling in before him, of the waves which his manhood delighted to buffet and overcome. For much favoring had never spoiled the sweetness of his character, and he met resistance with a healthy determination. He strolled into the surf, and a great billow lifted Jacqueline into his arms. He held her firmly as another followed close upon. “I hate the surf,” she gasped, blinded and helpless. “It does exactly with you what you do not want.” “Do you think so? Now rise to this one.” He lifted her over a magnificent roller, turning to watch it break, and sweep inward the less daring bathers near shore. “Why did you not wait for me?” he asked. “I never for a moment thought it necessary.” He looked delighted. “Is it very hard for you to accept the inevitable, Miss Selwyn?” “In what way, Mr. Merrington?” “In the way of my devotion?” She hesitated, not daring to take him seriously. He still held her hands, and the depth of the water at its smoothest was up to her neck as they stood. “We must look like a pair of jumping-jacks from the shore,” she said, with a swift remembrance of his deserved punishment at her hands, and of their present position. His strong muscles never seemed to tire of lifting her to each succeeding billow. She hardly knew how her reticence had slipped from her, but now, at the risk of being bowled over by a wave, she released her hands from his. He turned back with her. “Do not let me take you in,” she said, politely formal. “You have had no swim at all.” “There is always the ocean,” he replied. III.