“Something far more dignified could have happened when I heard you say ‘Calypso.’” She shrugged her shoulders.  “It’s done; we’ve misbehaved; and you will have to be dreadfully careful.  You will, won’t you?  And yet I shall certainly hate you heartily if you make any difference between me and other women.  Oh, dear!—­Oh, dear!  The whole situation is just unimportant enough to be irritating.  Mr. Hamil, I don’t think I care for you very much.”

And as he looked at her with a troubled smile, she added: 

“You must not take that declaration too literally.  Can you forget—­various things?”

“I don’t want to, Miss Cardross.  Listen:  nobody could be more sweet, more simple, more natural than the girl I spoke to—­I dreamed that I talked with—­last night.  I don’t want to forget that night, or that girl.  Must I?”

“Are you, in your inmost thoughts, fastidious in thinking of that girl?  Is there any reservation, any hesitation?”

He said, meeting her eyes:  “She is easily the nicest girl I ever met—­the very nicest.  Do you think that I might have her for a friend?”

“Do you mean this girl, Calypso?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think that she will return to you the exact measure of friendship that you offer her....  Because, Mr. Hamil, she is after all not very old in years, and a little sensitive and impressionable.”

He thought to himself:  “She is a rather curious mixture of impulse and reason; of shyness and audacity; of composure and timidity; of courage and cowardice and experience.  But there is in her no treachery; nothing mentally unwholesome.”

They stood silent a moment smiling at each other rather seriously; then her smooth hand slid from his, and she drew a light breath.

“What a relief!” she said.

“What?”

“To know you are the kind of man I knew you were.  That sounds rather Irish, doesn’t it?...”  And under her breath—­“perhaps it is.  God knows!” Her face grew very grave for a moment, then, as she turned and looked at him, the shadow fell.

“Do you know—­it was absurd of course—­but I could scarcely sleep last night for sheer dread of your coming to-day.  And yet I knew what sort of a man you must be; and this morning”—­she shook her head—­“I couldn’t endure any breakfast, and I usually endure lots; so I took a spin down the lake in my chair.  When I saw you just now I was trying to brace up on a guava.  Listen to me:  I am hungry!”

“You poor little thing—­”

“Sympathy satisfies sentiment but appetite prefers oranges.  Shall we eat oranges together and become friendly and messy?  Are you even that kind of a man?  Oh, then if you really are, there’s a mixed grove just beyond.”

So together, shoulder to shoulder, keeping step, they passed through the new grove with its enormous pendent bunches of grape-fruit, and into a second grove where limes and mandarins hung among clusters of lemons and oranges; where kum-quat bushes stood stiffly, studded with egg-shaped, orange-tinted fruit; where tangerines, grape-fruit, and king-oranges grew upon the same tree, and the deep scarlet of ripe Japanese persimmons and the huge tattered fronds of banana trees formed a riotous background.