"Because he had courted me at Caughnawaga.... And at first I think he made a sport of his courting,--like other young men of Tryon gentry who hunt and court to a like purpose.... And so, one day at Caughnawaga, I told him I was honest.... I thought he ought to know, lest folly assail us in unfamiliar guise and do us a harm." "Did you so speak to this young man?" "Yes, sir. I told him that I am a maiden. I thought it best that he should know as much.... And so he courted me no more. But every day he came and glowered at other men.... I laughed secretly, so fiercely he watched all who came to Cayadutta Lodge.... And then Sir John fled. And war came.... Well, sir, there is no more to tell, save that Captain Watts dared come hither." "To take you in his arms?" "He did so,--yes, sir,--for the first time ever." "Then he is honestly in love with you?" "But you, also, did the like to me. Is it a consequence of honest love, Mr. Drogue, when a young man embraces a maiden's lips?" Her questions had so disconcerted me that I found now no answer to this one. "I know nothing about love," said I, looking out at the sunlit waters. "Nor I," said she. "You seem willing to be schooled," I retorted. "Not willing, not unwilling. I do not understand men, but am not averse to learning something of their ways. No two seem similar, Mr. Drogue, save in the one matter." "Which?" I asked bluntly. "The matter of paying court. All seem to do it naturally, though some take fire quicker, and some seem to burn more ardently than others." "It pleasures you to be courted? Gallantries suit you? And the flowery phrases suitors use?" "They pleasurably perplex me. Time passes more agreeably when one is knitting. To be courted is not an unwelcome diversion to any woman, I think. And flowery phrases are pleasant to notice,--like music suitably played, and of which one is conscious though occupied with other matters." "If this be not coquetry," I thought, "then it is most perilously akin to it." Obscurely yet deeply disturbed by the blind stirring of emotions I could not clearly analyze, I sat brooding there. Now I watched her fingers playing with the steels, and her young face lowered; now I gazed afar across the blue Vlaie Water to the bluer mountains beyond, which dented the horizon as the great blue waves of Lake Ontario make molten mountains against an azure sky. So still was the world that the distant leap and splash of a great silver pike sounded like a gun-shot in that breathless, sun-drenched solitude.