Pointing well up into the wind, the graceful boat slipped rapidly through the water. She was breasting the incoming tide, Harry knew, for he could feel that peculiar quiver of the rudder that thrills through the tiller into the arm when a finely balanced boat heads the tide and beats to windward at the same time. Harry looked backward at the Quincy Point Village as it slowly drew away from him. He saw the fine old houses,—his own the finest of them all,—and was devoutly glad that the business reverses were not so great that they would have to leave that. On the rear veranda of one of them he saw the gleam of a white dress, and a young girl waved her hand at him. It was Maisie Adams, he knew, and he regretted that he had not seen her sooner. Maisie was a jolly good sailor, and he would have liked her for company. It was the time of the spring vacations, and Maisie was home from boarding-school. She would no doubt have enjoyed this first sail of the season. He almost decided to put back and ask her to go out, then he happened to think he was no longer the prospective Harvard freshman with plenty of money to spend, but the prospective clerk in an office, and not likely to have even the boat he was sailing, after a few days. He ought to have had sense enough to know that this would make no difference with Maisie, but he was only a boy after all, and could not be expected to know much about the way a really nice girl like Maisie would look at things of this sort. So he pulled his hat down over his eyes a little—to keep out the sun, of course—and sent the knockabout bowling along down the Fore River, by Germantown, by Rock Island Head, and out into the wider bay toward Hull, where he got the full sweep of the bustling spring breeze. Meanwhile Maisie pouted on the piazza. She had recognized Harry, and she, too, wished he had seen her sooner. The day was warm, almost like summer, and she would have liked a sail down the bay. However, she got some fancy work and sat down in a big piazza chair in the sun, with a wrap about her shoulders, determined to watch the boat if she could not sail in it. After a little while her mother came out. “Aren’t you catching cold out here, Maisie?” she asked. “I think not, mamma,” replied Maisie. “It’s just as warm as a summer day, and I thought it would be nice to sit here in the sun and embroider—and watch the boats. Sit down with me, won’t you, and talk to me?” “I knew you wouldn’t be home long before you were on the lookout for a sail,” said Mrs. Adams rather roguishly. She knew that Harry Desmond’s knockabout was the finest small boat on the river, and that he and Maisie were great friends. “There aren’t many of the boats in commission yet. I thought I saw the Princess”—that was Harry’s boat—“at the mooring yesterday, but I see that I was mistaken.”