Agatha, fresh as the morning, stood in the doorway for a contemplative moment, before coming forward to take Jim’s outstretched hand.

“Samson—­shorn!” she exclaimed gaily.  “I hardly know you, all fixed up like this.”

“Oh, I look much better than this when I’m really dressed up, you know,” Jim asserted.  Agatha patted his knuckles indulgently, looked at the thinness and whiteness of the hand, and shook her head.

“Not gaining enough yet,” she said.  “That isn’t the right color for a hand.”

“It needs to be held longer.”

“Oh, no, it needs more quiet.  Fewer visitors, no talking, and plenty of fresh milk and eggs.”

Jimmy almost stamped his foot.  “Down with eggs!” he cried.  “And milk, too.  I’m going to institute a mutiny.  Excuse me, I know I’m visiting and ought to be polite, but no more invalid’s food for me.  Handy Andy and I are going out to kill a moose and eat it—­eh, Andy?”

But Hand was gone.  Agatha sat down in a big rocker at the other window.  “In that case,” she said demurely, “we’ll all have to be thinking of Lynn and New York and work.”

Jim shamelessly turned feather.  “Oh, no,” he cried.  “I’m very ill.  I’m not able to go to Lynn.  Besides, my time isn’t up yet.  This is my vacation.”

He looked up smiling into Agatha’s face, ingenuous as a boy of seven.

“Do you always take such—­such venturesome holidays?” she asked.

“I never took any before; at least, not what I call holidays,” he said.  “If you don’t come over here and sit near me, I shall get up and go over to you.  And Andy says I’m very wobbly on my legs.  I might by accident drop into your lap.”

Agatha pushed her chair over toward James, and before she could sit down he had drawn it still closer to his own.  “The doctor says my hand has to be held!” he assured her, as he got firm hold of hers.

“For shame!” she cried.  “Mustn’t tell fibs.”

“Tell me,” he begged, “is this your house, really’n truly?” It brought, as he knew it would, her ready smile.

“Yep,” she nodded.

“And is that your tree out there?”

“Yep.”

“Ah!” he sighed.  “It’s great!  It’s Paradise.  I’ve dreamed of just such a heavenly place.  And Andy says we’ve been here two weeks.”

“Yes—­and a little more.”

“My holiday half gone!” His mood suddenly changed from its jocund and boyish manner, and he turned earnestly toward Agatha.

“I don’t know, dear girl, all that has happened since that night—­with you—­on the water.  Hand shuts me off most villainously.  But I know it’s Heaven being here, with Aleck and every one so good to me, and you!  You’ve come back, somehow, like a reality from my dreams.  I watch for you.  You’re all I think of, whether I’m awake or asleep.”

Agatha earnestly regarded his frank face, with its laughing, true eyes.  “Jimmy,” she said—­he had begged her to call him that—­“it seems as if I, too, had known you a long time.  More than these little two weeks.”