They passed the Science building, with its tower crowned by an ornamental openwork iron pyramid for wireless, and the segregated group of theological dormitories through whose windows earnest ringing young voices were sometimes heard at the practice of sermon-delivery, and the men’s club where the billiard tables were doubtless decorously covered with their customary Sunday sheets of black oilcloth, and took intuitively the path which led along the edge of the bluff. Beyond them, further bluffs and a few low headlands; here a lighthouse, there a water-tower; elsewhere (and not so far) the balconied roof of the lifesaving station, where the boats, light and heavy, were manned by muscular students: their vigilance and activity, interspersed with long periods of leisure or of absence, helped them to “pay their way.” Out toward the horizon a passenger steamer en route to some port farther north, or a long ore-freighter, singularly uneventful between bow and far-distant afterhouse, on its way down from the iron-ranges of Superior.
The path was narrow, but Cope, unexpectedly to himself, had no complaint to make. Really, the girl did better here, somehow, than lots of other girls would have done on a wide sidewalk. Most of them walked too close to you, or too far from you, altering the interval suddenly and arbitrarily, and tending to bump against you when you didn’t expect it and didn’t want it. They were uncertain at crossings; if it was necessary for them to take your arm, as it sometimes became, in the evening, on a crowded street, why, they were too gingerly or else pressed too close; and if it happened to rain, you sometimes had to take a cab, trafficking with a driver whose tariff and whose disposition you did not know: in fact, a string of minor embarrassments and expenses. …
But the way, this afternoon, was clear and easy; and there were no annoyances save from other walkers along the same path. The sun shone brightly at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad—white, or less white, or even darkling—the first windy sky of autumn.
Cope and Amy passed the lifesaving station, where a few people sat about idly and where one or two visitors pressed noses against glass panes to view the boats within; and they reached presently a sort of little public park which lay along the water. Here a small pier ran out past the shallows, and in front of a shack close by it a man sat resignedly near a group of beached and upturned rowboats. One or two others were still in the water, as was a small sloop. The fellow sat there without expectations: the season was about over; the day was none too promising for such as knew. His attitude expressed, in fact, the accumulated disappointment and resignation of many months. Perhaps he was a newcomer from the interior—some region of ponds and rivers—and had kept through an uneventful summer the notion that so big a spread of water would surely be put to use. The sail of the sloop, half-lowered, flapped in the breeze, and little else stirred.
Our young people overlooked both man and boat.
“It’s the same lake,” said Amy Leffingwell, rather dreamily, after a common silence of several minutes.
“The same,” returned Cope promptly. “It’s just what it was a year ago, a century ago; and a millennium ago, I suppose—if there was anyone here to notice.”
She turned on him a rueful, half-protesting smile. “I wasn’t thinking of a century ago. I was thinking of a month ago.”
“A month ago?”
“Yes; when we were walking along the dunes.”
“Oh, I see. Why, yes, it is the same old lake, though it seems hard to realize it. Foreground makes so much difference; and so does—well, population. I mean the human element, or the absence of it.”
Amy pondered.
“The one drawback, there, was that we couldn’t go out on the water.”
“Go out? I should say not. No pier for miles, and the water so shallow that hardly more than a canoe could land. Still, those fishermen out there manage it. But plain summerites, especially if not dressed for it, would have an unpleasant time imitating them.”
Amy cast her eye about. Here was a shore, a pier, a boat, a man to let it. …
“Would you like to go out?” asked the man himself perfunctorily, as from the depths of a settled despair. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward the sloop.
The two young people looked at each other. Neither looked at the sky. “Well, I don’t know,” replied Cope slowly. The sloop was on a pretty small scale; still, it was more to manage than a catboat.
“You have the theory, you know,” said Amy demurely, “and some practice.”
Cope looked at her in doubt. “Can you swim?” he asked.
“Yes,” she returned. “I have some practice, if not much theory.”
“Could you handle a jib?”
“Under direction.”
“Well, then, if you really wish …”
The misanthrope, with a twisted smile, helped them get away. The mainsail took a steady set; but the jib, from the first, possessed an active life of its own.
“Not that rope,” cried Cope; “the other.”
“Very well,” returned Amy, scrambling across the cockpit. And so it went.
In six or eight minutes their small catastrophe overtook them. There came a sudden flaw from out one of the racing gray cumuli, and a faint cry or two from the distant shore. Theory had not put itself into practice as quickly as the emergency required—all the less so in that it had to work through a crew encumbered with a longish skirt and a close jacket. The sloop keeled over; Cope was instantly entangled with the mainsail and some miscellaneous cordage; and Amy, with the water soaking her closely-fitting garments, found herself clutching the cockpit’s edge.
She saw Cope’s predicament and let go her hold to set him free. He helped shake himself loose with a loud forced
