ongs to? How fast she travels. I
should like to have a yacht like that."

"Would you?" he said, eying her rather strangely. "Perhaps some day----"

He stopped, and knocked the ash from his cigarette.

Nell laughed.

"Were you going to say that perhaps some day I should own one like her?
What nonsense! It is like the things one reads in books, when the
benevolent and wise old gentleman tells the boy that perhaps, if he
works hard, and is honest and persevering, he may own a carriage and a
pair like that which happens to be passing at the moment."

Vernon laughed.

"Life is full of possibilities," he said, with his eyes fixed on the
yacht, which, after sailing broadside to them for some time, suddenly
put down the helm and struck out for sea.

"I thought they might be making for Shorne Mills," said Nell, rather
regretfully. "Yachts put in there sometimes, and I should have liked to
have seen this one."

"Would you?" he said, as curiously as he had spoken before.

"It doesn't matter whether I would or wouldn't; she's gone out into the
channel now," said Nell.

He stifled a sigh which sounded like a sigh of relief, and steered the
_Annie Laurie_ for home.

Nell swept the fish into an old reed basket which had held many such a
catch, and held it up to the admiring and anticipatory gaze of a small
crowd of women and children which had gathered on the jetty steps at the
approach of the _Annie Laurie_.

As she stepped on shore and distributed the fish, receiving the short
but expressive Devonshire "Thank 'ee, Miss Nell, thank 'ee," Vernon
looked at the beautiful girlish face pensively, and thought--well, who
can tell what a man thinks at such moments? Perhaps he was thinking of
the hundred and one useless women of his class who, throughout the whole
of their butterfly lives, had never won a single breath of gratitude
from the poor in their midst.

"Come along," she said, turning to him, when she had emptied the basket.
"I'm afraid we're in for a scolding. I quite forgot till this moment
that mamma did not know you had gone out."

"What about you?" he said, remembering for the first time that he had
spent so many hours with this girl alone and unchaperoned.

Nell laughed.

"Oh, she would not be anxious about me. Mamma is used to my going out
for a ride--when I can borrow a horse from some one--or sailing the
_Annie Laurie_ with old Brownie; but she'll be anxious about you. You're
an invalid, you know."

"N