o 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" bring 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
self-excuse, 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,
head 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