tude. It was some time before I clearly understood that these
eyes belonged to a face, and that face the fairest that ever looked
on a summer day. First, as my gaze dropped before that vision of
radiant beauty, it saw only an exquisite figure draped in a dress of
some white and filmy stuff, and swathed around the shoulders with a
downy shawl, white also, across which fell one ravishing lock of
waving brown, shining golden in the kiss of the now drooping sun.
Then the gaze fell lower, lighted upon a little foot thrust slightly
forward for steadiness on the bank's verge, and there rested.

So we stood facing one another--Hero and Leander, save that Leander
found the effects of his bath more discomposing than the poets give
any hint of. So we stood, she smiling and I dripping, while the
blackbird, robbed of the song's ending, took up his own tale anew,
and, being now on his mettle, tried a few variations. So, for all
power I had of speech, might we have stood until to-day had not the
voice repeated--

"How can I thank you?"

I looked up. Yes, she was beautiful, past all criticism--not tall,
but in pose and figure queenly beyond words. Under the brim of her
straw hat the waving hair fell loosely, but not so loosely as to hide
the broad brow arching over lashes of deepest brown. Into the eyes I
dared not look again, but the lips were full and curling with humour,
the chin delicately poised over the most perfect of necks. In her
right hand she held a carelessly-plucked creeper that strayed down
the white of her dress and drooped over the high firm instep. And so
my gaze dropped to earth again. Pity me. I had scarcely spoken to
woman before, never to beauty. Tongue-tied and dripping I stood
there, yet was half inclined to run away.

"And yet, why did you make yourself so wet? Have you no boat?
Is not that your boat lying there under the bank?" There was an
amused tremor in the speech.

Somehow I felt absurdly guilty. She must have mistaken my glance,
for she went on:--"Is it that you wish--?" and began to search in the
pocket of her gown.

"No, no," I cried, "not that."

I had forgotten the raggedness of my clothes, now hideously
emphasised by my bath. Of course she took me for a beggar. Why not?
I looked like one. But as the thought flashed upon me it brought
unutterable humiliation. She must have divined something of the
agony in my eyes, for a tiny hand was suddenly laid on my arm and the
voice