“It does make a difference to me that he loves me,” confessed the girl.  “It is not easy to turn away from him,” she said,—­still standing, and looking taller than ever, and even thin, with a curious tenseness of her whole being.  “It is something that I have found it hard to fight against, but it is not my whole self longing for his love and his companionship.  If I heard he had gone to the other side of the world for years and years, I should be glad now and not sorry.  I know that all the world’s sympathy and all tradition fight on his side; but I can look forward and see something a thousand times better than being his wife, and living here in Dunport keeping his house, and trying to forget all that nature fitted me to do.  You don’t understand, Aunt Nancy.  I wish you could!  You see it all another way.”  And the tears started to the eager young eyes.  “Don’t you know that Cousin Walter said this very day that the wind which sets one vessel on the right course may set another on the wrong?”

“Nonsense, my dear,” said the mistress of the house.  “I don’t think this is the proper time for you to explain yourself at any rate.  I dare say the fresh air will do you good and put everything right too.  You have worked yourself into a great excitement over nothing.  Don’t go out looking so desperate to the poor fellow; he will think strangely of it;” and the girl went out through the wide hall, and wished she were far away from all this trouble.

Nan had felt a strange sense of weariness, which did not leave her even when she was quieted by the fresh breeze of the river-shore, and was contented to let her oars be stowed in the bottom of the boat, and to take the comfortable seat in the stern.  She pulled the tiller ropes over her shoulders, and watched her lover’s first strong strokes, which had quickly sent them out into the stream, beyond the course of a larger craft which was coming toward the wharf.  She wished presently that she had chosen to row, because they would not then be face to face; but, strange to say, since this new experience had come to her, she had not felt so sure of herself as now, and the fear of finding herself too weak to oppose the new tendency of her life had lessened since her first recognition of it the night before.  But Nan had fought a hard fight, and had grown a great deal older in those hours of the day and night.  She believed that time would make her even more certain that she had done right than she could be now in the heat of the battle, but she wished whatever George Gerry meant to say to her might be soon over with.

They went slowly up the river, which was now quite familiar to the girl who had come to it a stranger only a few weeks before.  She liked out-of-door life so well that this countryside of Dunport was already more dear to her than to many who had seen it bloom and fade every year since they could remember.  At one moment it seemed but yesterday that she had come to the old town, and at the next she felt as if she had spent half a lifetime there, and as if Oldfields might have changed unbearably since she came away.