Her returning eye fell upon a bobbing object in the water, very near her, and her heart missed a beat. Her lips moved soundlessly. _Jack Dalhousie!_... The bobbing object, in fact, was the head of a man of the sea; a youthful swimmer who had come up on her unseen--behind her till she had put about. The lad was swimming rapidly, though with a curious waste of motive power, and was so close that Miss Heth seemed to herself to be staring full into his face. His course was laid dead across her bows; for other reasons, too, his piratical intentions were instantly obvious to the girl in the boat. How did he dare!--after all these months ... For an exciting second she plotted escape by flight, but the impulse was all but still-born. He would be on her before she could put about. The girl sat entirely still, regarding the swimmer in a kind of fascinated silence. The irony of fate, indeed, that, at a moment when her whole mind and heart were toward the rose-pink future, this scapegrace ghost from her only "past" should have risen out of the sea upon her. To dream of a Canning, and be entrapped by a Dalhousie!... The youth sloshed alongside, laid hold of the boat's nose, and methodically and with some difficulty pulled himself in. The weight of his ingress tipped the gunwale to the water's edge, but Carlisle made no outcry. She was clear of head; and the heart of her desire was to be free of this misadventure without attracting attention from the shore. She said in a sharp, clear voice: "Mr. Dalhousie, are you perfectly crazy?" Dalhousie, in his swimmer's suit, sat stiffly forward, sluicing water into the bottom. He was a big and well-built boy, with a face that had no viciousness; but his dark eyes, with their heavy silken lashes, were hardly meant for a man. Neither was his mouth, for all that he sought to set it so firmly now. "Mr. Dalhousie," he repeated with elaborate distinctness. "When d' I--draw that--title?" The girl sat eyeing him with frosty calm: a look which covered rage within, not unmingled with perturbation.... He was a neighbor of hers, this audacious youth, though not of Washington Street; impecunious, and hence negligible; moreover somewhat notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the boredom of a dull resort, far from her mother's restrictive eye, she had for an idle fortnight allowed the relation between them to become undeniably changed. Foolish indeed; but really she had thought--or now really thought she had thought--that the impossible youth took it all no more seriously than she. Not till her return home last month had he revealed his complete untrustworthiness: presuming, as she termed it, making claims and advances, putting her to trouble to keep her vernal unwisdom from her mother. Still, she _had_ thought she had disposed of him at last....