"Feeling that she had not mended matters much, Amy took the offered third of a seat, shook her hair over her face" (Joan personally suspected that Amy belonged also to the order of the Brazen Hussies) "and accepted an oar. "'How well we pull together, don't we?' said Amy, who objected to silence just then. "'So well that I wish we might always pull together in the same boat. Will you, Amy?' very tenderly. "'Yes, Laurie,' very low. "Then they both stopped rowing, and unconsciously added a pretty little tableau of human love and happiness to the dissolving views reflected in the lake." This classic scene was not absent from Joan's mind as she seated herself and her blue chiffon recklessly in the prow of Eduard's canoe; though the details of stage-management troubled her somewhat. Suppose the proposer chose to kneel at the feet of the proposee--since there was no seat to share with her? And suppose the proposer lost his head (as might properly be expected of him) and embraced the proposee madly--what was to prevent so precarious a thing as a canoe from tipping over! It seemed to call for great presence of mind on the part of the proposee. Joan felt rather nervous. Mr. Desmond, however, let the opportunity pass. Perhaps he had not read "Little Women." Amid talk so casual that it might as well have been silence, they slipped along between the wide gray of earth and sky, afloat on a stream of silver. They came presently to an overhanging willow, where he tied the boat, and helped Joan ashore. He led her, with an air of one performing a ceremony, up a slight rise of land topped by a great beech-tree, whose widespread roots made a sort of armchair, after the hospitable fashion of beech-trees. "Queen Joan on her throne, viewing her domain," he murmured. He had not brought her to this place before, and she realized that he had been saving it for a special occasion. There was a view before her of shadowy, dreaming country, with a hint of stars to come, and sheep-bells tinkling in a distant field, and lights gleaming here and there from half-hidden houses. Eduard began to murmur softly: "When the quiet-colored end of evening smiles, Miles on miles O'er our many-tinkling meadows where the sheep Half asleep, Wander homeward through the twilight, browse and crop As they stop--" A sudden impatience seized Joan. How like him to arrange this setting, to bring things carefully to a climax, and then--to spout Browning at her! But she said, as he paused, "Beautiful! 'Love among the Ruins,' isn't it?" "Yes--And I," he sighed, tapping himself on the chest, "I am the Ruins!" Despite the bombast of his tone, there was something in his sigh that struck her as genuine. She said consolingly, "At least you're a well-preserved ruin, very popular with tourists.... I wonder what makes you feel so particularly ruinous to-night?"