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It is a little difficult, looking back, to explain our state of mind that night. It was only our second taste of romance—Aggie's roofer being too far back to count. Now, with six months of perspective, I think we were intoxicated with adventure to the point of abandon. For when Mr. Mansfield offered to take us home, before starting on his pursuit of the motor canoe, we refused to go. As Tish said:

"No doubt when you do overtake them, Mr. Mansfield, the young woman will feel the need of some of her own sex, women of—er—maturity and experience, to advise her. I consider it our duty to go."

"Oh, leth go!" said Aggie. "Mr. Carletonth a large man. Do you think you will have to fight him for your lady?" Aggie's tone was cheerfully bloodthirsty, and she clutched the end of the broken oar like a club. Aggie, the apostle of peace!

"Frankly, I should like to see the end of the affair myself," I admitted. "I should like to see the young lady's face when she finds you eloping with three maiden ladies, and—I am curious to know how your cave-man theory works out."

He was working over the engine, and we were headed down the lake. While I was speaking he moved to the other side of the launch, and it tilted villainously. He loomed very large in the darkness, and the strength of his bare arms and heavy chest, his sinewy legs, made him not unlike his prototype.

He did not answer me at once. He had found some cigarettes in the boat, and he lighted one. Only when it was well aglow did he show that he had heard me.

"The original cave man was no fool," he observed, calmly looking ahead. "A man doesn't carry a woman off unless he's crazy about her, in the first place. If he's got sufficient force of character to dare her daddy's stone club— jail, in this case—and enough physical strength to hold her to him with one arm and fight off pursuit and rivals with the other, it—well, it doesn't matter much what the girl thinks of him in the beginning: she'll die for him, in the end."

Aggie positively thrilled in the darkness beside me, and even Tish was silenced by the vision of this masculine point of view. As for me, just at that instant I quite agreed with the young savage I

"Ith—ith the very pretty?" Aggie ventured, after swallowing hard.

"I don't know," he said indifferently, straining his eyes ahead. "Oh— yes, I suppose she is. I never thought about it. I haven't thought of anybody else— anything else, for the week I've known her."

"The week!" we all repeated faintly.

"When her groom lifts her off her horse, I want to kill him. If that ass Carleton gets her to Telusah first and marries her, I'll take her from him. She's my woman."

Tish stood right up in the boat and pointed her finger at him. "You d-don't know what you are talking about," she stuttered. "How —how dare you speak of taking a married woman from her husband!"

"Figs!" he said disrespectfully. "In the first place, if the engine holds out, we'll rim them down at least a mile from Telusah, and in the second place, while I judge you are talking by the book and not by experience— a, few words said over a man and a woman don't make them husband and wife. It gives the woman the man's name, but—the man don't necessarily get the woman. Mine—or nobody's," he added under his breath.

Tish collapsed into her chair. I admit I felt queer all over, and Aggie's heart had fluttered back to the thin young man with the curled-up mustache and a dimple in his chin, who had fallen off a roof.

''Mister Wigginth usthed to talk exactly that way!" she said softly.

That is the way we went down toward Telusah: the prehistoric gentleman in the bow steering and watching the engine, now and then stopping it dead to listen for the throb of the motor canoe ahead. Aggie twitteringly in the past, with her bare feet tucked under her for warmth and the broken oar in her lap; Tish blazing with indignation and excitement, and I saved by my sense of humor from going into violent hysteria and embracing the hot-headed, mad, ridiculous and altogether satisfactory young animal at the wheel. I merely said:

"I wish somebody had wooed me like that thirty years ago. I wouldn't be earning my own living, young man."

"That's what she wants to do—stay single and work for a livelihood," he said with disgust. "I told her it was all fool nonsense; that the place for her kind of woman was in some man's home—"

"Cave," I suggested.

"Bearing his children—"

"Silence!" Tish shouted, and even Aggie was roused out of a dream.

He shut down the engine just then, and we all heard it: a faint throbbing that one felt in the ears, rather than heard. He leaped up on the peak of the boat and stared into the darkness ahead.

"Better than I expected," he said with suppressed excitement "They're not a mile ahead. I wish I had a stick of some sort: I may have to knock that chump on the head."

Luckily he did not see Aggie's oar, and to his everlasting honor be it said, he went dauntlessly into the battle with his bare hands. "And bare arms and legs," Tish ironically suggests that I add.

For battle it was.

We overtook the canoe somewhere about Long Point, and our lantern showed two people, as we expected. It was Mr. Carleton, who evidently hadn't dressed to elope, and who wore the shirt of a bathing suit and a pair of corduroy trousers, and the Girl. She was in a white party frock of some sort She stopped paddling and stared up at us defiantly as we must have loomed black behind our lantern. She was very pretty, and she had two triangular red spots in her cheeks. Our gentleman pulled the shawl around him and stepped on the thwarts, and even at that distance we could see the angry fear in the girl's eyes.

"Lillian," Mr. Mansfield said cheerfully, "I am not going to do that puppy with you the honor of asking you to choose between us. I give you your choice—either get into the launch comfortably, or stay where you are—in which case I shall run you down and pick you out of the water."

"You coward!" said Mr. Carleton from the stem of the canoe. "You can't try your high-handed methods with me. Run us down if you like. It's a penitentiary offense to kidnap a girl and marry her."

"Oh, piffle r said Mr. Mansfield rudely. "I suppose you didn't intend to marry her yourself at Telusah!"

"I intended to return her to her parents in safety, by way of the trolley," retorted Carleton stiffly.

The Mansfield man threw back his head and laughed.

"Did you hear that, Lillian?" he called. "That's love for you! Why, the idiot didn't even intend to marry you! He was going to take you home to your people!" He laughed again in pure delight.

But the girl had plenty of spirit.

"I don't intend to be married at all," she flared at him. "Certainly not to you, Donald Mansfield. Run us down if you like. I would rather die than marry you."

"You hear what she says," said Carleton, from the darkness. "If you are a gentleman you will take your boat and your ruffianly accomplices back to where you came from—or to hell, as far as I'm concerned."

"Ruffian yourself," Tish said furiously, but I pulled her down. There was silence, then—

"Lillian," Mr. Mansfield said very gently, " 'Lady' Carleton is right. If it's as bad as that I'll take you home. I had a sort of fool idea that you would know it was inevitable— that you were my woman. If I've been a bit raw about it, it's because the thing seemed so clear to me. Give me your hand."

"I shall not get into the launch," the girl said haughtily.

"Your hand."

"Confound you, Mansfidd, can't you see she hates you?" This was Carleton, of course.

"The girlth a fool," Aggie muttered angrily, behind me. In the instant that I turned my head, something happened—I don't know just what For the girl was alone in the canoe, we were alone in the launch, and just below me the water was boiling into white spray. Now and then an arm shot into the air, or a leg, and occasionally, not often, both heads were above water at the same time. And it was then that Aggie, the president of the Civic Club and corresponding secretary of the Working Girls' Home, with her draggled skirts pinned up above her bare feet, stood up suddenly and banged Mr. Carleton on the head with what was left of her oar!

But if that was amazing, the most surprising thing followed. The Girl stood up in the canoe and—

Oh, youVe killed him!" she screeched. Oh, Don! Don!" Donald being the Mansfield man!

Then, of course, the canoe turned over, and the rest of what she was saying ended in a gurgle.