“Perhaps you will let me put the oars in for you,” he suggested. He was rather alarmed after he had spoken, but when he glanced at the girl to see how she had taken his further self-invited assistance he found her looking at him in a very friendly way. All at once he felt quite elated and at his ease. It had been a long while since he had had much to do with American girls, and he concluded that all that had been said about their charming freedom and cordiality of manner had not been exaggerated. But when he had put the sculls in the boat it occurred to him that it would not do to presume too far on that freedom and cordiality, and that if he was not to depart immediately--and he felt no inclination to do so--he must offer some sort of explanation of himself. “I am waiting for my sister,” he remarked genially. “Oh! your sister,” echoed the girl. “Yes--Miss Allardyce. Perhaps you are in the same class,” he hazarded. She looked at him for a moment in a slightly surprised way, and then out across the water, and Allardyce saw, as she turned her head away from him, that she was smiling. “No,” she said slowly, “but I know her quite well.” “Ah! I’m glad of that,” said the young man, boldly and cheerfully. “Now I feel quite as if I had been properly introduced! ‘_Les amis de nos amis_,’ you know!” The girl smiled back at him. “I am Miss Brent. By the way, your sister has the distinction of being the only Allardyce in college. It’s a rather unusual name.” “Yes,” assented Allardyce, delightedly. “Scotch, you know.” And then in a sudden burst of confidence--“My people were Scotch and French. I have been educated abroad and have come home for the law course at the University. Awfully glad to be in America again, too, for, after all, I am an American through and through.” He pulled himself up sharply in some confusion and amusement at his unusual loquacity. But the girl before him did not seem to find it strange, and was quite interested and politely attentive. “And where is your sister?” she demanded. “Oh, that’s the essential, and I forgot to mention it,” he replied, laughing a little and digging his stick into the soft earth. “She’s gone off walking!” and then he went on insinuatingly and plaintively--“And I don’t know a soul here--never was here before in my life--and there’s no train to Boston, and I have to wait two hours for her!” The young woman smiled sympathetically. “That’s too bad,” she said, and then she looked doubtfully at Allardyce. He seemed very young and to be having a rather bad time of it, and there is an unwritten law at the college which constitutes every member of it the natural protector and entertainer of lost or bored strangers. “I am going across the lake for water-lilies,” she went on after a little hesitation. “If you care to come you may, and pull me about while I gather them. It is hard work to do it alone.”