They exchanged the commonplaces of such a meeting.
"Why are you so solemn?" she broke in finally. "You look as if you'd lost your last friend."
He looked at her. "That is the way I feel."
They fell silent. She did not like at all the gloomy fashion of his scrutiny. It made her nervous. She felt creeping on her heart that mysterious heaviness, the weight of something unknowable, which she had lately been at such pains to forget. She did not like it. With an effort, she shook it off and laughed.
"What's the matter?" she cried with forced gayety. "Didn't he sleep well? Don't he like my looks, or the freckle on my nose, or the way I wear my cap?"--she tossed the latter rakishly on her curls, and tilted her head sideways.
"What is the matter?" she asked with a sudden return to gravity.
"You are the matter," he answered briefly.
"Oh dear!" she cried with petulance; "has it come to that?"
"No, it has not come to that, not what you mean. But it has come to this: that your conduct has made every true friend of yours feel just as I do."
"Heavens! you frighten me! What _have_ I done? Come over here on this log and tell me about it."
Graham's vehement little speech had vented the more explosive portion of his emotion. Whatever he should say now would be inspired rather by conviction than impulse; and the lover's natural unwillingness deliberately to antagonize his mistress made it exceedingly difficult to continue. He hesitated.
"You _must_ tell me now," she commanded; "I insist. Now, what have I done?"
"It isn't so much what you have done," began Graham lamely, "as what you might do. You see you are very young, and you don't know the world; and so you might walk right into something very wrong without realizing in the least what you are doing, and without meaning to do wrong at all. Everybody owes it to himself to make the best out of himself, and you must know that you have great possibilities. But it isn't that so much. I wish I knew how to tell you exactly. You ought to have a mother. But if you'd only let us advise you, because we know more about it than you----"
The girl had watched him with gleaming eyes. "That doesn't _mean _anything," she interrupted. "What is it, now? Out with it!"