“You know, Mr. Hubbard, sometimes my intuitions warn me a little too strongly to be ignored.  Oh, yes, you needn’t tell me again that it’s difficult to distinguish between fancy and intuition.  I know all that.  But I also know that there’s something deep down in that man’s soul that calls to something deep down in mine.  And at present it frightens me.  Because I cannot make out what it is; and I know, I know, he’ll do something some day that—­that will shake my life to the very bottom.”  She laughed a little at the strangeness of her own description.

I turned to look at her more closely, but the darkness was too great to show her face.  There was an intensity, almost of suppressed passion, in her voice that took me completely by surprise.

“Nonsense, Joan,” I said, a little severely; “you know him well.  He’s been with your father for months now.”

“But that was in London; and up here it’s different—­I mean, I feel that it may be different.  Life in a place like this blows away the restraints of the artificial life at home.  I know, oh, I know what I’m saying.  I feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one’s nature begins to melt and flow.  Surely you must understand what I mean!”

“Of course I understand,” I replied, yet not wishing to encourage her in her present line of thought, “and it’s a grand experience—­for a short time.  But you’re overtired to-night, Joan, like the rest of us.  A few days in this air will set you above all fears of the kind you mention.”

Then, after a moment’s silence, I added, feeling I should estrange her confidence altogether if I blundered any more and treated her like a child—­

“I think, perhaps, the true explanation is that you pity him for loving you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy, vigorous animal for what is weak and timid.  If he came up boldly and took you by the throat and shouted that he would force you to love him—­well, then you would feel no fear at all.  You would know exactly how to deal with him.  Isn’t it, perhaps, something of that kind?”

The girl made no reply, and when I took her hand I felt that it trembled a little and was cold.

“It’s not his love that I’m afraid of,” she said hurriedly, for at this moment we heard the dip of a paddle in the water, “it’s something in his very soul that terrifies me in a way I have never been terrified before,—­yet fascinates me.  In town I was hardly conscious of his presence.  But the moment we got away from civilisation, it began to come.  He seems so—­so real up here.  I dread being alone with him.  It makes me feel that something must burst and tear its way out—­that he would do something—­or I should do something—­I don’t know exactly what I mean, probably,—­but that I should let myself go and scream—­”

“Joan!”

“Don’t be alarmed,” she laughed shortly; “I shan’t do anything silly, but I wanted to tell you my feelings in case I needed your help.  When I have intuitions as strong as this they are never wrong, only I don’t know yet what it means exactly.”