Her seriousness and evident intensity of feeling were a surprise to him. He had simply been trying her with a careless stroke, but he seemed to strike true flint. "I could have sworn," he thought to himself, "that she was making fun of Ebling's proposition to read to her to-day when she said one could stand hearing a poem a good many times." And he actually went on repeating passage after passage, while she sat with her hands folded and her eyes fixed dreamily, drinking it in like distant music sounding all the way from the Spanish shores. They were both so absorbed--not in the poem, but in thoughts that floated under the poem and circled right around themselves--that they did not hear the dipping of the oars as the doctor rowed back to shore in the white moonlight--not softened now, as it had been a while ago, by the mellow tints in the west. "Hallo!" he called. "Come down now and embark." "Shall we?" asked Bruce in a voice so low that it seemed almost tender. She answered by getting up, and he took the burnous off the log and folded it about her shoulders. It gave her a conscious thrill. They sauntered down, and Bruce gave her his hand to make the descent of the bank. Ruth sprang up like a gazelle while the doctor held the boat to shore, and then pushed it off when the occupants were seated. "I'm the poorest rower in Christendom," said Bruce, taking up the oars and making a few awkward strokes. "Never mind about rowing," said Miss Custer. "When we get out into the current let us drift: I like it just as well." Bruce did so, resting the handles of the oars upon his knees. Perfect silence reigned. The moon was strangely bright, making the very air silvery. Miss Custer, with the rarest tact, let the stillness alone, knowing there was power in it. By and by Bruce murmured, "With dreamful eyes, My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise. What a strange effect moonlight and water have upon us, Miss Custer! They seem almost to disembody us. I can hardly ever recall a single line of poetry in the daytime when the sun is shining. But moonlight brings out all the delicate images of the mind's palimpsest." "Pray, then, go on and repeat something more," said Miss Custer in a low voice: "I like to hear you. Repeat the rest of 'Drifting.'" Bruce complied, and then struck upon Byron, and was surprised and delighted to find that Miss Custer followed him even there. The truth was, Miss Custer had rehearsed all these things many times before with different actors. The whole plot lay before her, ending and all. Bruce was certainly hooked, and all she had to do was to draw the line carefully in. To be sure, he was an odd specimen, a sort of man she was not much acquainted with; but that made him all the more interesting, and she was conscious of her power to manage him.