He was clumsy at this work, but she instructed
him in whispers, and they managed to reach the ladder as the clocks were
striking five. The tide was far down by this time, and she held the
boat close to the ladder while he prepared to climb. With his foot on
the first round, he turned. She was white as a ghost, and trembling
from top to toe.

"Nance--did you say your name was Nance?"

She nodded.

"What's the matter?"

"I'll--I'll let you off, if you want to be let off."

"I'm not sure that I do," he said, and stealing softly up the ladder,
stood at the top and watched her boat as she steered it back to Ruan.

Three months after, they were married, to the indignant amazement of the
minister's congregation. It almost cost him his pulpit, but he held on
and triumphed. There is no reason to believe that he ever repented of
his choice, or rather of Nance's. To be sure, she had kidnapped him by
a lie; but perhaps she wiped it out by fifty years of honest affection.
On that point, however, I, who tell the tale, will not dogmatise.

WHICH?

The scene was a street in the West End of London, a little south of
Eaton Square: the hour just twenty-five minutes short of midnight.

A wind from the North Sea had been blowing all day across the Thames
marshes, and collecting what it could carry; and the shop-keepers had
scarcely drawn their iron shutters before a thin fog drifted up from
lamp-post to lamp-post and filled the intervals with total darkness--all
but one, where, half-way down the street on the left-hand side, an
enterprising florist had set up an electric lamp at his private cost, to
shine upon his window and attract the attention of rich people as they
drove by on their way to the theatres. At nine o'clock he closed his
business: but the lamp shone on until midnight, to give the rich people
another chance, on their way home, of reading that F. Stillman was
prepared to decorate dinner-tables and ball-rooms, and to supply bridal
bouquets or mourning wreaths at short notice.

The stream of homeward-bound carriages had come to a sudden lull.
The red eyes of a belated four-wheeler vanished in the fog, and the
florist's lamp flung down its ugly incandescent stare on an empty
pavement. Himself in darkness, a policeman on the other side of the
street flashed his lantern twice, closed the slide and halted for a
moment to listen by an area railing.

Halting so, he heard a rapid footfall at the upper corne