"I'm through with him," said Eleanore cheerfully. "I've shown him all I possibly can. What you need now," she added, turning to me in her old easy manner, "is to watch the harbor all by yourself and get your own feelings about it. You might begin at the North River docks." I spent a wretched afternoon. All my plans for my work and my life assumed the most gray and desolate hues. Eleanore was taking a nap. At last she came down and gave me some tea. "May I come out and see you now and then?" I asked her very humbly. "It would help me so much to talk over my work." "No," she answered kindly, "I think you'd better not." "Why not?" I blurted. "What have I done?" She hesitated, then looked at me squarely. "You've made my absurd young father," she said, "think that he is no longer young." I lost just a moment in admiration. There wasn't one girl in a hundred who would have come out with it like that. Then I seized my chance. "Why, it's perfectly idiotic," I cried. "Here's a man so big he's a giant beside me, so full of some queer magnetic force that on the way up here in the boat he made me forget that I was there. I forgot that _you_ were there," I threw in, and I caught just the sign of a gleam in her eyes. "No longer young?" I continued. "That man will be young when you and I are blinking in our dull old age! He's the biggest man I ever met! And I want to know him, I want to know how he thinks and feels, I want that more than anything else! And now you come between us!" "Are you real?" asked Eleanore. I looked back unflinchingly. "Just you try me," I retorted. "No," she replied with a quiet smile. She said good-by to me that night. * * * * * The next morning at seven o'clock I met her father down at the boat. We had a quick swim together and then climbed on board. And the next minute, with a sober old seaman called "Captain Arty" at the wheel, the boat was speeding for New York while we dressed and cooked and breakfasted. "This was Eleanore's idea," Dillon said. "It gets me to town by nine o'clock and takes me back each day at five. So I hardly miss a night at home.... Did she ever tell you," he went on, "about the first week she spent in this boat?" "She said it was a wonderful time." "It was a nightmare," Dillon said. I looked at him quickly: "What do you mean?" "Her fight for her strength. She looked like a ghost--with a stiff upper lip. She fainted twice. But she wouldn't give up. She said she knew she could do it if I'd only let her stick it out. She has quite a will, that daughter of mine," he added quietly.