Helene DeBerczy had this weakness, common to generous souls, that she could not utter an ungenerous remark without suffering more than her victim. So, scarcely more than a minute elapsed before she said appealingly, "You are not going to leave me with the last word, are you?" "Is not that what your sex specially like to have?" "Perhaps so. I should prefer to have the _best_ word, and--" "And let a certain well-known gentleman take the hindmost?" supplied the young man smilingly. "If he only would! What a shocking thing to say, but with me it is always conscience who has the very hindmost word; and my conscience is perfect mistress of the art of saying disagreeable things. At the present moment she is trying to make me believe that I have been unpardonably rude to you." "She is mistaken then, for even if it were possible for you to be rude, I could not fail to pardon you immediately." "There! now you have had the best word. It is useless for me to try to say anything better than that. Perhaps the most becoming thing I could do would be to relapse into ignominious silence." "Silence! Desolation! And with a two-mile pull yet before us! If I have had the best word you have uttered the worst one. What so terrible as silence?" "It is said to be golden." "And, like the gold that Robinson Crusoe discovered on his island, it is of no particular use to anyone." "It is one of the charms of Nature." "A charm that I have never discovered. What about the ever-present hum of multitudinous insects, the song of birds, the moan of winds, the laughter of leaping water? It seems to me that Nature is all voice." "Then, suppose," said the undaunted young lady, lifting her languorous lids, "that we listen to her voice." There was no answering this; but, as the bonnet now veered towards the sunny south, and the boat rounding the sharp corner of the bay abruptly turned in the same direction, the young man was surprised to find himself looking his companion fully in the face, caught in the sudden sunshine of her smile.