"Rag, dear old boy!" She parted with caressing fingers the skein of tow on the frowsled head. "Come on, Rag." Champney whistled and started up the driveway. The terrier fawned on Aileen, slavered, snorted, sniffed, then crept almost on his belly, tail stiff, along the ground after Champney who turned and laid his hand on him. The dog crouched in the road. He gently pulled the stumps of ears--"Now come!" He went whistling up the road, and the terrier, recognizing his master, trotted in a lively manner after him. Champney turned at the gate and lifted his hat. "How about fidelity now, Miss Armagh?" He wanted to tease in payment for that amazed look she gave him for taking a liberty with her Christian name. "Well, of course, he's your dog," she called merrily after him, "but _I_ wouldn't have done it if I'd been Rag!" Champney found himself wondering on the homeward way if she really meant what she said. IV It was a careless question, carelessly put, and yet--Aileen Armagh, before she returned to the house, was also asking herself if she meant what she said, asking it with an unwonted timidity of feeling she could not explain. On coming in sight of the terrace, she saw that Mrs. Champney was still there. She hesitated a moment, then crossed the lawn to the boat house. She wanted to sit there a while in the shade, to think things out with herself if possible. What did this mean--this strange feeling of timidity? The course of her life was not wholly smooth. It was inevitable that two natures like hers and Mrs. Champney's should clash at times, and the impact was apt to be none of the softest. Twice, Aileen, making a confidant of Octavius, threatened to run away, for the check rein was held too tightly, and the young life became restive under it. When the child first came to Champ-au-Haut, its mistress recognized at once that in her mischief, her wilfulness, her emphatic assertion of her right of way, there was nothing vicious, and to Octavius Buzzby's amazement, she dealt with her, on the whole, leniently. "She amuses me," she would say when closing an eye to some of Aileen's escapades that gave a genuine shock to Octavius in the region of his local prejudices. There had been, indeed, no "folderols" in her education. Sewing, cooking, housework she was taught root and branch in the time not spent at school, both grammar and high. During the last year Mrs. Champney permitted her to learn French and embroidery in a systematic manner at the school established by the gentle Frenchwomen in The Gore; but she steadily refused to permit the girl to cultivate her voice through the medium of proper instruction. This denial of the girl's strongest desire was always a common subject of dissension and irritation; however, after Aileen was seventeen a battle royal of words between the two was a rare occurrence.