Mines and counter-Mines.

The sight of the party on the veranda of the Shrubberies brought a return of self-consciousness to Peter, and he braced himself, as the trap slowed up, for the agony of formal greetings.  If Miss Pierce had been a less sweet, sympathetic girl, she could hardly have kept from smiling at the way Peter’s face and figure stiffened, as the group came in sight.  But Miss Pierce had decided, before she met Peter, that she should like him, and, moreover, that he was a man who needed help.  Let any woman reach these conclusions about a man, and for some reason quite beyond logic or philosophy, he ceases to be ridiculous.  So instead of smiling, she bridged over the awful greetings with feminine engineering skill quite equal to some great strategic movement in war.  Peter was made to shake hands with Mrs. Pierce, but was called off to help Miss Pierce out of the carriage, before speech was necessary.  Then a bundle was missing in the bottom of the carriage, and Mr. Pawling, the New York swell, was summoned to help Peter find it, the incident being seized upon to name the two to each other.  Finally, he was introduced to the two girls, but, almost instantly, Watts and Peter were sent to their rooms; and Miss Pierce, nodding her head in a way which denoted satisfaction, remarked as she went to her own room, “Really, Helen, I don’t think it will be so very hard, after all.  He’s very tractable.”

As Peter came downstairs, before dinner, he speculated on whether he should be able to talk to Miss Pierce.  He rather doubted from past experience, if such a result was attainable, seeing that there were two other men, who would of course endeavor to do the same.  But strangely enough the two men were already seated by the New York girls, and a vacant chair was next that holding Miss Pierce.  What was more, he was at once summoned to fill it, and in five minutes was again entirely unconscious of everything but the slate-colored eyes, looking so pleasantly into his.  Then he took Miss Pierce in to dinner, and sat between her and her mother again becoming absorbed in the slate-colored eyes, which seemed quite willing to be absorbed.  After dinner, too, when the women had succeeded the weed, Peter in someway found it very easy to settle himself near Miss Pierce.  Later that night Peter sat in his room, or rather, with half his body out of the window, puffing his pipe, and thinking how well he had gone through the day.  He had not made a single slip.  Nothing to groan over.  “I’m getting more experienced,” he thought, with the vanity noticeable in even the most diffident of collegians, never dreaming that everything that he had said or done in the last few hours, had been made easy for him by a woman’s tact.