“Yes.”

“And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me home and stay to supper?  Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you.”

“All right.  I’ll be glad to.  What will you do between now and four o’clock?”

“Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets.”

“You’re welcome if you can find any.  I don’t deal in ’em.”

When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time, rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said: 

“You’ve started me to theorizing about myself.”

“Do it aloud,” she invited.

“Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know.  We were never anywhere as much as a month at a time.  In a way, I liked the change and adventure.  In another way, I got dead sick of it.  Don’t you suppose that my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?”

“It sounds reasonable enough.  You might put it more simply by saying that you were tired.  But by now you ought to be rested.”

“Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?”

“If you don’t stir, you’ll rust.”

“Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism.”

She shot an impatient side-glance at him.  “Either you’re a hundred years old,” she said, “or that’s sheer pose.”

“Perhaps it is a sort of pose.  If so, it’s a self-protective one.”

“Suppose I asked you to come to New York?”

Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words, foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.

“What to do?”

“Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course!” she shot back at him.  “Ban, you are aggravating!  ‘What to do?’ Father would find you some sort of place while you were fitting in.”

’No.  I wouldn’t take a job from you any more than I’d take anything else.”

“You carry principles to the length of absurdity.  Come and get your own job, then.  You’re not timid, are you?”

“Not particularly.  I’m just contented.”

At that provocation her femininity flared.  “Ban,” she cried with exasperation and appeal enchantingly mingled, “aren’t you going to miss me at all when I go?”

“I’ve been trying not to think of that,” he said slowly.

“Well, think of it,” she breathed.  “No!” she contradicted herself passionately.  “Don’t think of it.  I shouldn’t have said that....  I don’t know what is the matter with me to-day, Ban.  Perhaps I am fey.”  She smiled to him slantwise.

“It’s the air,” he answered judicially.  “There’s another storm brewing somewhere or I’m no guesser.  More trouble for the schedule.”

“That’s right!” she cried eagerly. “Be the Atkinson and St. Philip station-agent again.  Let’s talk about trains.  It’s—­it’s so reliable.”