"I agree with you but let me ask one more question. You say your work is harder and you _do_ look tired and worn out. Why don’t you take a decent rest on your holidays? Last year you spent them here, out of doors, loafing about. Now you go to town. I’ve been over twice on Thursdays and when I ask for you, always hear you’re in the city. And you’ve been at other times too—Mrs. Janney told me so. It’s the most fatiguing thing you can do in this hot weather. Why do you go?" He saw her color suddenly deepen. She had let the knitting drop to her lap and now she took it up again and began to work, very fast, the needles flashing in her white hands. She smiled as she answered: "You seem to have kept rather a sharp look-out on me, Mr. Ferguson. Did it never occur to you that a woman _might_ need clothes, or might want to see a friend who happened to be staying in town for the summer?" The young man had been admiring the white hands. As she spoke something in their movements caught and held his eye—they were trembling. He was so surprised that he made no answer, his glance riveted on them trying to hold the needles steady to their task. Miss Maitland made an effort to go on, then dropped the knitting in a bunch on her knees and clasped the hands over it. Neither speaking, their eyes met. The expression of hers, furtively apprehensive like a scared child’s pierced his heart and he leaned toward her, his sunburned face full of concern: "Miss Maitland, what’s wrong? Something is—tell me." Without answering she shook her head, her lips tightly compressed. He could see that she was shaken, that the clasped hands on her knee were clenched together to control their trembling. He could see that, for a moment, taken unawares, she did not trust herself to speak. "Look here," he said, low and urgent, "be frank with me. I’ve seen for some time something was troubling you—I told you so that night at my place. Why not let me lend a hand? That’s what I want to do—that’s what I’m _for_." She had found her voice and it came with a high, light hardness, in curious contrast to the feeling in his: "You’re all wrong, Mr. Ferguson. You’re seeing what doesn’t exist." She started to her feet, making a grab at her knitting as it slid toward the ground. "Oh, my needle! I almost pulled it out. That _would_ have been a calamity." She carefully pushed the stitches on to the needle as if her whole interest lay in preserving the woven fabric. "There I’ve picked them up, not lost one." Then she looked at them, smiling, her expression showing a veiled defiance, "You ought to have been a novelist—your imagination’s wasted. Here you are seeing me as a distressed damsel, while I’m only a perfectly normal, perfectly common-place person. Romantic fiction would have been your line." She gave a laugh that brought the blood to the young man’s face, for its musical ripple contained a note of derision: