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staying here any longer. I'll tell my mother I must be back in London to dinner, make my bow, jump into a boat, and scull down to Chelsea. So I will. The scull will do me good, and if if she has gone on the water with that snob, why I shall know the worst. What a strange, odd girl she is! And oh! how I wish she wasn't!'

But it takes time to find a lady, even of Mrs. Stanmore's presence, amongst five hundred of her kind jostled up in half an acre of ground; neither will the present code of good manners, liberal as it is, bear a guest out in walking up to his hostess à bout portant, to interrupt her in an interesting conversation, by bidding her a solemn good-bye hours before anybody else has begun to move. Twenty minutes at least must have elapsed ere Dick found himself in a dainty outrigger with a long pair of sculls, fairly launched on the bosom of the Thames-more than time for the corsair, if corsair he should be, to have sailed far out of sight with false, consenting Maud in the direction of London Bridge.

Dick was no mean waterman. The exercise of a favourite art, combining skill with muscular effort, is conducive to peace of mind. A swim, a row, a gallop over a country, a fencing bout, or a rattling set-to with 'the gloves' brings a man to his senses more effectually than whole hours of quiescent reflection. Ere the perspiration stood on Dick Stanmore's brow, he suspected he had been hasty and unjust; by the time he caught his second wind, and had got fairly into swing, he was in charity with all the world, reflecting, not without toleration and selfexcuse, that he had been an ass!

So he sculled on, like a jolly young waterman, making capital way with the tide, and calculating that if the fugitive pair should have done anything so improbable as to take the water in company, he must have overhauled, or at least sighted them ere now.

His spirits rose. He wondered why he should have been so desponding an hour ago. He had made excuses for himself-he began to make them for Maud, nay, he was

fast returning to his allegiance, the allegiance of a day, thrown off in five minutes, when he sustained another damper, such as the total reversal of his outrigger and his own immersion, heels uppermost, in the Thames, could not have surpassed.

At a bend of the river near Putney he came suddenly on one of those lovely little retreats which fringe its banks-a red-brick house, a pretty flower-garden, a trim lawn, shaded by weeping-willows, kissing the water's edge. On that lawn, under those weeping-willows, he descried the graceful, pliant figure, the raven hair, the imperious gestures, that had made such havoc with his heart, and muttering the dear name, never before coupled with a curse, he knew for the first time, by the pain, how fondly he already loved this wild, heedless, heartless girl, who had come to live in his mother's house. Swinging steadily along in mid-stream, he must have been too far off, he thought, for her to recognise his features; yet why should she have taken refuge in the house with such haste, at an open window, through which a pair of legs clad in trousers, denoted the presence of some male companion? For a moment he turned sick and faint, as he resigned himself to the torturing truth. This Mr. Ryfe, then, had been as good as his word, and she, his own proud, refined, beautiful idol, had committed the enormity of accompanying that imperious admirer down here. What could be the secret of such a man's influence over such a girl? Whatever it was, she must be Dick's idol no longer. And he would have loved her so dearly!-so dearly!

There were tears in the eyes of this jolly young waterman as he pulled on.. These things hurt, you sce, while the heart is fresh and honest, and has been hitherto untouched. Those should expect rubbers who play at bowls; if people pull their own chestnuts out of the fire they must compound for burnt fingers; and when you wager a living, loving, trustful heart against an organ of wax, gutta-percha, or Aberdeen granite, don't be surprised

if you get the worst of the game all through.

He had quite given her up by the time he arrived at Chelsea, and had settled in his own mind that henceforward there must be no more sentiment, no more sunshine, no more romance. He had dreamt his dream. Well for him it was so soon over. Semel insanivimus omnes. Fellows had all been fools once, but no woman should ever make a fool of him again! No woman ever could. He should never see another like her!

Perhaps this was the reason he walked half a mile out of his homeward way, through Belgrave Square, to haunt the street in which she lived, looking wistfully into those gardens whence he had seen her emerge that very day with her mysterious companion-gazing with plaintive interest on the bell-handle and door-scraper of his mother's house-vaguely pondering how he could ever bear to enter that house again-and going through the whole series of those imaginary throes, which are indeed real sufferings with people who have been foolish enough to exchange the dignity and reality of existence for a dream.

What he expected I am at a loss to explain; but although, while pacing up and down the street, he vowed every turn should be the last, he had completed his nineteenth, and was on the eve of commencing his twentieth, when Mrs. Stanmore's carriage rolled up to the door, stopping with a jerk, to discharge itself of that lady and Maud, looking cool, fresh, and unrumpled as when they started. The revulsion of feeling was almost too much for Dick. By instinct, rather than with intention, he came forward to help them out, so confused in his ideas, that he failed to remark how entirely his rapid retreat from the breakfast had been overlooked. Mrs. Stanmore seemed never to have missed him. Maud greeted him with a merry laugh, denoting more of good humour and satisfaction than should have been compatible with keen interest in his movements, or justifiable pique at his desertion.

'Why here you are!' she ex

claimed gaily. 'Actually home before us, like a dog, that one takes out walking to try and lose. Poor thing! did it run all the way under the carriage with its tongue out? and wasn't it choked with dust, and isn't it tired and thirsty? and won't it come in, and have some tea?'

What could Dick say or do? He followed her upstairs to the back drawing-room, meek and submissive, as the dog to which she had likened him, waiting for her there with a dry mouth and a beating heart, while she went to 'take off her things;' and when she reappeared smiling and beautiful, able only to propound the following ridiculous question with a gasp

'Didn't you go on the water then after all?

'On the water! she repeated. 'Not I. Nothing half so pleasant, I assure you. I wish we had! for anything so slow as the whole performance on dry land, I never yet experienced. I danced five dances, none of them nice ones-I hate dancing on turf-and I had a warmwater ice and some jelly that tasted of bees'-wax. What became of you? We couldn't find you anywhere to get the carriage. However, I asked Aunt Agatha to come away directly somebody made a move, because I was cross and tired and bored with the whole business. I think she liked it much better than I did; but here she is to answer for herself.'

Dick had no dinner that day, yet what a pleasant cigar it was he smoked as he coasted Belgrave Square once more, in the sweet spring evening under the gas-lamps! He had been very unhappy in the afternoon, but that was all over now. Anxiety, suspicion, jealousy, and the worst ingredient of the latter, a sense of humiliation, had made wild work with his spirits, his temper, and indeed his appetite; yet twenty minutes in a dusky back drawingroom, a cup of weak tea, and a slice of inferior bread and butter, were enough to restore self-respect, peace of mind, and vigour of digestion. He could not recal one word that bore an unusually favourable meaning, one look that might not have been directed to a brother or an intimate friend, and still he felt buoyed up with hope, restored to happiness. The reaction had come on, and he was more in love with her than ever.

CHAPTER VIII. :
NINA.

It might have spared Mr. Stanmore a deal of unnecessary discomfort had the owner of those legs which he saw through the open window at Putney thought fit to show the rest of his person to voyagers on the river. Dick would then have recognized an old college friend, would have landed to greet him with the old college heartiness, and in the natural course of events would have satisfied himself that his suspicions of Maud were unfounded and absurd.

Simon Perkins is not a romantic name, nor did the exterior of Simon Perkins, as seen either within or without the Putney cottage, correspond with that which fiction assigns to a hero of romance. His frame was small and slight, his complexion pale, his hair weak and thin, his manner diffident, awkward, almost ungainly, but that its thorough courtesy and good-nature were so obvious and unaffected. In general society people passed him over as a shy, harmless, unmeaning little man; but those who really knew him affirmed that his courage was not to be damped, nor his nerve shaken, by extremity of danger-that he was always ready with succour for the needy, with sympathy for the sorrowful-in short, as they tersely put it, that 'his heart was in the right place.'

For half a dozen terms at Oxford he and Dick had been inseparable. Their intimacy, none the less close for dissimilarity of tastes and pursuits, since Perkins was a reading man and Dick a 'fast' one, had been still more firmly soldered by a long vacation spent together in Norway, and a thrilling tableau,' as Dick called it, to which their expedition gave rise. Had Simon Perkins's heart been no stouter than his slender person, his companion

must have died a damp death, and this story would never have been told.

The young men were in one of the most picturesque parts of that wild and beautiful country, created, as it would seem, for the express gratification of the fisherman and the landscape painter, Simon Perkins-an artist in his very soulwholly engrossed by the sketch of a mountain, Dick Stanmore equally absorbed in fishing a pool. Scarce twenty yards apart, neither was conscious, for the moment, of the other's existence, Simon, indeed, being in spirit some seven thousand feet above the level of the sea, putting more ochre into the virgin snow that crested his topmost peak, and Dick deftly dropping a fly, the size of a pen-wiper, over the nose of a fifteen-pounder that had already once risen to the gaudy lure.

Poising himself, like a Mercury, on a rock in mid-stream, the angler had just thrown eighteen yards of line lightly as a silken thread to an inch, when his foot slipped, and a loud splash, bringing the painter, like Icarus, out of the clouds with a run, startled his attention to the place where his companion was not. În another second Simon had his grip on Dick's collar, and both men were struggling for dear life in the pool. Stanmore could swim, of course, but it takes a good swimmer to hold his own in fisherman's boots, encumbered, moreover, with sundry paraphernalia of his art. Simon was a very mild performer in the water, but he had coolness, presence of mind, and inflexible tenacity of purpose. To these qualities the friends owed it that they ever reached the shore alive. It was a very near thing, and when they found their legs and looked into each other's faces, gasping, dripping, spouting water from ears, nose, and mouth, Dick gathered breath to exclaim, 'You trump! I should have been drowned, to a moral!' Whereat the other, choking, coughing, and sputtering, answered faintly, 'You old muff! I believe we were never out of our depth the whole time!'

Perkins did not go up for his degree, and the men lost sight of

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