"Good heavens, don't hold that up against him! Don't I listen to you?" "Oh, but you never let me think you agree with me! I always know you don't." "He agrees far more than I do." "No," she said, with a somber look. "He just let me talk. He didn't care. The things that were real to me weren't real to him. His real things were--what's happening now. The baby, and Laura. Is it so with all of you? Don't you ever care with your _minds_?" He stopped tickling Zip, and looked out over the lake with narrowing eyes; after a while he said, gently: "I think the caring with the mind comes second. When a man falls in love, the mind has nothing to do with it. Sometimes it reinforces the heart, so to speak; when that happens, you have the perfect marriage--which isn't awfully common. It's apt to be just the heart; which gets pretty dull after a while. But just the head is arid." "He would have found just my head,--arid?" she pondered. He looked straight at her, and said, quietly: "I think he would." There was a long pause. "Was it head, or heart, with you?" she said. "It's both," he said. She gave him a puzzled look: "Why, you don't mean that you care for that horrid Kate, still?" He smiled, and looked off over the water. "You are very stupid, Fred." She was plainly perplexed. "I don't understand?" "That's why I say you are stupid." His face was turned away from her; he was breaking a dead twig into inch-long pieces, and carefully arranging them in a precise fagot on his knee; she saw, with a little shock of surprise, that his fingers were trembling. "Why, Arthur!" she began,--and stopped short, the color rising slowly to her forehead. He gave her a quick look. "Why!" she said again, faintly, "you don't mean--? you're not--?" He laughed, opening his hands in a gesture of amused and hopeless assent. "I am," he said, and flung the tiny fagot out on the water. Fred dropped her chin on her fists and watched the twigs dancing off over the waves. They were both silent; then she said, frowning, and pausing a little between her words as if trying to take in their full meaning:--"You are in love with me." "Has it just struck you?" "How could it strike me--that you would care for a girl like me!" "Considering your intelligence, you are astonishingly obtuse, at times. I couldn't care for any other kind of girl. Or for any girl, except you!" "Miss Eliza said something that made me wonder if.... But I couldn't believe it. I thought that sort of thing was over for you. I never dreamed of--" "Oh, well! don't dream of it now. Of course it doesn't make a particle of difference. I didn't mean to speak of it; it sort of broke loose," he ended, in rueful confession. Fred was silent. Arthur Weston, hiding the tremor that was tingling all through him, began to talk easily, of anything--Zip, the weather, whether Miss Carter could be induced to reconsider her annual resignation; "It would be very hard on Mrs. Payton to lose her," he said.