“I hope I was with you,” he said, with a sudden turn of levity, which did not displease her, for there seemed to be a tender earnestness lurking in it.  “I couldn’t bear to think of your being alone in such a howling wilderness.”

“Oh, I was with a large picnic,” she retorted gaily.  “You might have been among the rest.  I didn’t notice.”

“Well, the next time, I wish you’d look closer.  I don’t like being left out.”  They were so far behind the rest that he devoted himself entirely to her, and they had grown more and more confidential.

They came to a narrow foot-bridge over a deep gorge.  The hand-rail had fallen away.  He sprang forward and gave her his hand for the passage.  “Who helped you over here?” he demanded.  “Don’t say I didn’t.”

“Perhaps it was you,” she murmured, letting him keep the fingers to which he clung a moment after they had crossed the bridge.  Then she took them away, and said:  “But I can’t be sure.  There were so many others.”

“Other fellows?” he demanded, placing himself before her on the narrow path, so that she could not get by.  “Try to remember, Miss Pasmer.  This is very important.  It would break my heart if it was really some one else.”  She stole a glance at his face, but it was smiling, though his voice was so earnest.  “I want to help you over all the bad places, and I don’t want any one else to have a hand in it.”

The voice and the face still belied each other, and between them the girl chose to feel herself trifled with by the artistic temperament.  “If you’ll please step out of the way, Mr. Mavering,” she said severely, “I shall not need anybody’s help just here.”

He instantly moved aside, and they were both silent, till she said, as she quickened her pace to overtake the others in front, “I don’t see how you can help liking nature in such a place as this.”

“I can’t—­human nature,” he said.  It was mere folly; and an abstract folly at that; but the face that she held down and away from him flushed with sweet consciousness as she laughed.

On the cliff beetling above the bay, where she sat to look out over the sad northern sea, lit with the fishing sail they had seen before, and the surge washed into the rocky coves far beneath them, he threw himself at her feet, and made her alone in the company that came and went and tried this view and that from the different points where the picnic hostess insisted they should enjoy it.  She left the young couple to themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden Alice to be a little more with her.