"Oh, dear!" she said finally; and she wiped her eyes. "_What_ you must think of me!"--and she looked away, a pretty frown contracting her face; then the jolly dimple deepened once again and she choked into her handkerchief. "Oh, _dear_!" she repeated, biting her lip to hold her quivering mouth corners. "Oh, it's a shame," I heard her mutter; "I _mustn't_ let him--it's too--" She wheeled upon me, her lips tightened. "Oh!" she ejaculated sharply, almost petulantly, and her foot struck smartly on the boards. "I wonder how much you think--think--" "Think _lots_," I said simply, watching her little toe as it tapped. "Well, _I_ should think as much!" And this time her laugh was short--oddly constrained. She looked away off down the slope to the river. "_Oh!_" This time it was a tiny gasp as of dismay. And the toe tapped like an electric what's-its-name. "Yes," I said, watching it musingly, "I suppose it's because you're the only girl, don't you know, that I ever _did_ think of before--oh, ever at all, dash it!" The toe stopped. I could _feel_ her looking at me sidewise, but I did not glance up, that I remember; was looking down, trying to get hold of a dashed idea I wanted to express. "Don't know," I continued, boring away at her toe, yet hardly seeing it, "but suppose that's the reason I knew all the time she was _lying_; but still, somehow that doesn't seem to be the _real_ reason I knew. I think the real reason I knew it couldn't be and wasn't true was"--I sighed heavily--"oh, dash it, it's _so_ hard to get hold of the jolly thing!" And there was a pause. "The real reason?" her voice coaxed gently. "Was because--" Then she moved the toe and it put me out--"I think just because--oh, yes, I _know_ now!" And I looked up eagerly. "Just because I knew that you--are _you_!" I finished beamingly. "Oh, I see!" She said it musingly, her finger lightly pressing upon her lips, her beautiful eyes studying me with the oddest, keenest side-glance. A pause; and then: "And _how_ long have you known me, pray? Just a--" "A thousand years!" I said promptly and earnestly. "A thousand years and all my life, don't you know! Never will know you any better." "I wonder," she murmured, nodding slowly. And then for a moment she didn't say a word, just sat there looking me over curiously, her expression half shy, half quizzical, don't you know. Then her smile flashed again--a radiant, dazzling brightness that brought her nearer, like the effect of the sunlight's sudden gleam there at times upon the blue line of the "West Shore" away across the broad, three-mile span of the old Tappan Zee.