to die and would give him scant thanks for the rescue.

This thought was followed by the other that in her access of terror she
was doing what the drowning person always does--losing her head,
threatening to bind his arms with her own and drag him down with her.

Struggling half blindly and all silently they rose a little toward the
surface. Packard tightened his grip about her body, managed to
imprison one of her arms against her side, beat at the water with his
free hand, and so, just as his lungs seemed ready to burst, he brought
his nostrils into the air.

He drew in a great breath and struck out mightily for the shore,
seeking a less precipitous bank at the head of a little cove. As he
did so, he noted how her struggles had suddenly given over, how she
floated quietly with him, her free arm even aiding in their progress.

A little later he crawled out of the clear, cold water to a pebbly
beach, drawing her after him.

And now he understood that his destiny and his own headlong nature had
again made a consummate fool of him. The same knowledge was offered
him freely in a pair of gray eyes which fairly blazed at him. No
gratitude there of a maiden heroically succored in the hour of her
supreme distress; just the leaping anger of a girl with a temper like
hot fire who had been rudely handled by a stranger.

Her scanty little bathing-suit, bright blue like the discarded cloak,
the red rubber cap binding the bronze hair--she must have donned the
ridiculous thing with incredible swiftness while he batted an
eye--might have been utterly becoming in other eyes than those of Steve
Packard. Now that they merely told him that he was a blundering ass,
he was conscious solely of a desire to pick her up and shake her.

"Gee!" she panted at him with an angry scornfulness which made him
wince. "You're about the freshest proposition I ever came across!"

Later, perhaps, he would admit that she was undeniably and most
amazingly pretty; that the curves of her little white body were
delightfully perfect; that she had made an armful that at another time
would have put sheer delirium into a man's blood.

Just now he knew only that in his moment of nothing less than stupidity
he had angered her and that his own anger though more unreasonable was
scarcely less heated; that he had made and still made but a sorry
spectacle; that he was sopping wet and cold and would be shivering in a
moment like a freezing dog.

"Why did