e intended," he explained, but did not
tell her how nearly they had gone out of bounds altogether.

"You'll enjoy a cup of tea. You look as if you'd been working hard."

"There is a bit of a current round that point."

"Ah, you should follow a good example and keep within touch of the
bottom. Here you are, Meg--fresh made for every customer. Help
yourself, Mr. Graeme. I've had mine, I couldn't wait. Tea never tastes
so good as when you're half full of salt-water, and I got right out of
my depth once and swallowed tons. I screamed to you two to come and
save me, but you never paid the slightest attention, and for all you
cared I might have been drowned five times over."

"One would have been quite once too many," said Graeme, holding out
his cup. "For then you couldn't have lighted that fire and made this
tea. And I'm half inclined to think we wouldn't be enjoying it a
quarter so much if a little blue corpse lay out there on the shining
sand, and we'd had to turn to and make it ourselves."

"Horrible!" said Miss Penny, with a little shiver. "With your little
blue corpses! It's all very well to joke about it, but I assure you,
for a minute or so, I thought I was done for. The bottom seemed to
have sunk, and I was just going after it when my foot came on a rock
and that helped me to kick ashore."

"A narrow escape," said Graeme, with a sympathetic wag of the head.
"You've no right to risk your life that way. We still need you. What
do you say to being bridesmaid at a Sark wedding?"

"It is the hope of my life," said Miss Penny, sparkling like Mars in a
clear evening sky.

"I really don't see any reason why we should wait"--said Graeme,
looking very earnestly at Margaret, and behind the look was the
thought, born of what they had just come through together, that life
spills many a full cup before the thirsty lips have tasted it. "What
do you say, Margaret?"

And she, knowing well what was in him, and being of the same mind,
said, "I am ready, Jock. When you will."

"I'll call on the Vicar to-morrow," he said joyfully. "It would be
such a pity to disappoint the hope of Miss Penny's life,"--as that
young person came back with the merry kettle.

"I am indebted to you," said Hennie Penny. "What about dresses, Meg?"

IV

It was that same night, as they were sauntering home from a starlight
ramble, that they came on Johnnie Vautrin crouched in the hedge with
Marielihou, and Marielihou had her hind leg bound up i