Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend’s help. He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the endeavor to free her; but in vain. She extended him the scissors with the stern passivity of a fate. “Cut it,” she commanded, and Mr. Libby knelt before her and obeyed. “Thanks,” she said, taking back the scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up her work in her handkerchief. “I’ll go out and get my things. I won’t be gone half a minute, Mr. Libby,” said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished indoors. Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over her work. If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by looking up at him suddenly. “I hope,” he faltered, “that you feel like a sail, this morning? Did Mrs. Maynard—” “I shall have to excuse myself,” answered Grace, with a conscience against saying she was sorry. “I am a very bad sailor.” “Well, so am I, for that matter,” said Mr. Libby. “But it’s smooth as a pond, to-day.” Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through him. “Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe.” “Oh yes!” cried the young man, the light of pleasant recollection kindling in his gay eyes. “We had a good time. Maynard was along: he’s a first-rate fellow. I wish he were here.” “Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.” She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man’s, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent. In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him. “I heard of Mrs. Maynard’s being here, and I thought I should find him, too. I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.” Grace decided that this was mere effrontery. “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so. She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express. She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless. “Have you ever seen him?” Libby asked, perhaps clinging to Maynard because he was a topic of conversation in default of which there might be nothing to say. “No,” answered Grace.