She had approached silently and was enjoying, I felt sure, my discomfiture at being taken unawares. I had snatched off my cap and stood waiting beside the canoe, feeling, I must admit, a trifle guilty at being caught in the unwarrantable inspection of another person’s property—particularly a person so wholly pleasing to the eye. “Really, if you don’t need that paddle any more—” I looked down and found to my annoyance that I held it in my hand,—was in fact leaning upon it with a cool air of proprietorship. “Again, I beg your pardon,” I said. “I hadn’t expected—” She eyed me calmly with the stare of the child that arrives at a drawing-room door by mistake and scrutinizes the guests without awe. I didn’t know what I had expected or had not expected, and she manifested no intention of helping me to explain. Her short skirt suggested fifteen or sixteen—not more—and such being the case there was no reason why I should not be master of the situation. As I fumbled my pipe the hot coals of tobacco burned my hand and I cast the thing from me. She laughed a little and watched the pipe bound from the dock into the water. “Too bad!” she said, her eyes upon it; “but if you hurry you may get it before it floats away.” “Thank you for the suggestion,” I said. But I did not relish the idea of kneeling on the dock to fish for a pipe before a strange school-girl who was, I felt sure, anxious to laugh at me. She took a step toward the line by which her boat was fastened. “Allow me.” “If you think you can,—safely,” she said; and the laughter that lurked in her eyes annoyed me. “The feminine knot is designed for the confusion of man,” I observed, twitching vainly at the rope, which was tied securely in unfamiliar loops. She was singularly unresponsive. The thought that she was probably laughing at my clumsiness did not make my fingers more nimble. “The nautical instructor at St. Agatha’s is undoubtedly a woman. This knot must come in the post-graduate course. But my gallantry is equal, I trust, to your patience.” The maid in the red tam-o’-shanter continued silent. The wet rope was obdurate, the knot more and more hopeless, and my efforts to make light of the situation awakened no response in the girl. I tugged away at the rope, attacking its tangle on various theories. “A case for surgery, I’m afraid. A truly Gordian knot, but I haven’t my knife.” “Oh, but you wouldn’t!” she exclaimed. “I think I can manage.” She bent down—I was aware that the sleeve of her jacket brushed my shoulder—seized an end that I had ignored, gave it a sharp tug with a slim brown hand and pulled the knot free. “There!” she exclaimed with a little laugh; “I might have saved you all the bother.” “How dull of me! But I didn’t have the combination,” I said, steadying the canoe carefully to mitigate the ignominy of my failure.