At Stoke Revel, in the meantime, the solemn rites of dinner had been inaugurated as usual by the sounding of the gong at seven o’clock. Mrs. de Tracy, Miss Smeardon, and Bates waited five minutes in silent resignation, then Carnaby came down and was scolded for being late, but there was no Robinette and no Lavendar.

“Carnaby,” said his grandmother, “do you know where Mark intended going this afternoon?”

“No, I don’t,” said Carnaby, sulkily.

“Your cousin Robinetta,”––with meaning,––“perhaps you know her whereabouts?”

“Not I!” replied Carnaby with affected nonchalance. “I was ferreting with Wilson.” He had ferreted perhaps for fifteen 171 minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon in solitary discontent, but he would not have owned it for the world.

“Call Bates,” commanded Mrs. de Tracy. Bates entered. “Do you know if Mr. Lavendar intended going any distance to-day? Did he leave any message?”

“Mr. Lavendar, ma’am,” said Bates, “Mr. Lavendar and Mrs. Loring they went out in the boat after tea. Mr. Lavendar asked William for the key, and William he went down and got out the oars and rudder, ma’am.”

“Does William know where they went?” asked Mrs. de Tracy in high displeasure. “Was it to Wittisham?”

“No, ma’am, William says they went down stream. He thinks perhaps they were going to the Flag Rock, and he says the gentleman wouldn’t have a hard pull, as the tide was going out. But Mr. Lavendar knows the river well, ma’am, as well as Mr. Carnaby here.”

“Then I conclude there is no immediate cause for anxiety,” said Mrs. de Tracy with 172 satire. “You can serve dinner, Bates; there seems no reason why we should fast as yet! However, Carnaby,” she continued, “as the men cannot be spared at this hour, you had better go at once and see what has happened to our guests.”

“Right you are,” cried Carnaby with the utmost alacrity. He was hungry, but the prospect of escape was better than food. He rushed away, and his boat was in mid-river before Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon had finished their tepid soup.

A very slim young moon was just rising above the woods, but her tender light cast no shadows as yet, and there were no stars in the sky, for it was daylight still. The evening air was very fresh and cool; there was no wind, and the edges of the river were motionless and smooth, although in mid-stream the now in-coming tide clucked and swirled as it met the rush. Over at Wittisham one or two lights were beginning to twinkle, and there came drifting across the 173 water a smell of wood smoke that suggested evening fires. Carnaby handled a boat well, for he had been born a sailor, as it were, and his long, powerful strokes took him along at a fine pace. But although he was going to look for Robinette and Mark, he was rather angry with both of them, and in no hurry. He rested on his oars indifferently and let the tide carry him up as it liked, while, with infinite zest, he unearthed a cigarette case from the recesses of his person, lit a cigarette, and smoked it coolly. Under Carnaby’s apparent boyishness, there was a certain somewhat dangerous quality of precocity, which was stimulated rather than checked by his grandmother’s repressive system. His smoking now was less the monkey-trick of a boy, than an act of slightly cynical defiance. He was no novice in the art, and smoked slowly and daintily, throwing back his head and blowing the smoke sometimes through his lips and sometimes through his nose. He looked for the moment older than his years, and 174 a difficult young customer at that. His present sulky expression disappeared, however, under the influence of tobacco and adventure.

“Where the dickens are they?” he began to wonder, pulling harder.

A bend in the river presently solved the mystery. On a wide stretch of mud-bank, which the tide had left bare in going out, but was now beginning to cover again, a solitary boat was stranded.

With this clue to guide him, Carnaby’s bright eyes soon discovered the two dim forms in the distance.

“Ahoy!” he shouted, and received a joyous answer. Robinette and Mark were the two derelicts, and their rescuer skimmed towards them with all his strength.

He could get only within a few yards of the rock to which their boat was tied, and from that distance he surveyed them, expecting to find a dismal, ship-wrecked pair, very much ashamed of themselves and getting 175 quite weary of each other. On the contrary the faces he could just distinguish in the uncertain light, were radiant, and Robinette’s voice was as gay as ever he had heard it. He leaned upon his oars and looked at them with wonder.

“Angel cousin!” cried Robinette. “Have you a little roast mutton about you somewhere, we are so hungry!”

“You are a pretty pair!” he remarked. “What have you been and done?”

“We just went for a row after tea, Middy dear,” said Robinette, “and look at the result.”

“You’re not rowing now,” observed Carnaby pointedly.

“No,” said Mark, “we gave up rowing when the water left us, Carnaby. Conversation is more interesting in the mud.”

“But how did you get here? I thought you were going to the Flag Rock?” demanded Carnaby.

“Is there a Flag Rock, Middy dear? I 176 didn’t know,” said Robinette innocently. “It shows we shouldn’t go anywhere without our first cousin once removed. We just began to talk, here in the boat, and the water went away and left us.” Then she laughed, and Mark laughed too, and Carnaby’s look of unutterable scorn seemed to have no effect upon them. They might almost have been laughing at him, their mirth was so senseless, viewed in any other light.

“It’s nearly eight o’clock,” he said solemnly. “Perhaps you can form some idea as to what grandmother’s saying, and Bates.”

“Well, you’re going to be our rescuer, Middy darling, so it doesn’t matter,” said Robinette. “Look! the water’s coming up.”

But Carnaby seemed in no mood for waiting. He had taken off his boots, and rolled up his trousers above his knees.

“I’d let Lavendar wade ashore the best way he could!” he said, “but I s’pose I’ve got to save you or there’d be a howl.”

“No one would howl any louder than you, 177 dear, and you know it. Don’t step in!” shrieked Robinette, “I’ve confided a shoe already to the river-mud! I just put my foot in a bit, to test it, and down the poor foot went and came up without its shoe. Oh, Middy dear, if your young life––”

“Blow my young life!” retorted Carnaby. He was performing gymnastics on the edge of his boat, letting himself down and heaving himself up, by the strength of his arms. His legs were covered with mud.

“No go!” he said. “It’s as deep as the pit here; sometimes you can find a rock or a hard bit. We must just wait.”

They had not long to wait after all, for presently a rush of the tide sent the water swirling round the stranded boat, and carried Carnaby’s craft to it.

“Now it’ll be all right,” said he. “You push with the boat-hook, Mark, and I’ll pull”; but it took a quarter of an hour’s pushing and pulling to get the boat free of the mud.

Except for the moon it would have been 178 quite dark when the party reached the pier. They mounted the hill in some silence. It was difficult for Robinette to get along with her shoeless foot; Lavendar wanted to help her, but she demanded Carnaby’s arm. He was sulking still. There was something he felt, but could not understand, in the subtle atmosphere of happiness by which the truant couple seemed to be surrounded; a something through which he could not reach; that seemed to put Robinette at a distance from him, although her shoulder touched his and her hand was on his arm. Growing pangs of his manhood assailed him, the male’s jealousy of the other male. For the moment he hated Mark; Mark talking joyous nonsense in a way rather unlike himself, as if the night air had gone to his head.

“I am glad you had the ferrets to amuse you this afternoon,” said Robinette, in a propitiatory tone. “Ferrets are such darlings, aren’t they, with their pink eyes?”

“O! darlings,” assented Carnaby derisively. 179 “One of the darlings bit my finger to the bone, not that that’s anything to you.”

“Oh! Middy dear, I am sorry!” cried Robinette. “I’d kiss the place to make it well, if we weren’t in such a hurry!”

Carnaby began to find that a dignified reserve of manner was very difficult to keep up. His grandmother could manage it, he reflected, but he would need some practice. When they came to a place where there were sharp stones strewn on the road, he became a mere boy again quite suddenly, and proposed a “queen’s chair” for Robinette. And so he and Lavendar crossed hands, and one arm of Robinette encircled the boy’s head, while the other just touched Lavendar’s neck enough to be steadied by it. Their laughter frightened the sleepy birds that night. The demoralized remnant of a Bank Holiday party would have been, Lavendar observed, respectability itself in comparison with them; and certainly no such group had ever approached Stoke Revel before. They were to 180 enter by a back door, and Carnaby was to introduce them to the housekeeper’s room, where he undertook that Bates would feed them. Lavendar alone was to be ambassador to the drawing room.

“The only one of us with a boot on each foot, of course we appoint him by a unanimous vote,” said Robinette.

But the chief thing that Carnaby remembered, after all, of that evening’s adventure, was Robinette’s sudden impulsive kiss as she bade him good-night, Lavendar standing by. She had never kissed him before, for all her cousinliness, but she just brushed his cool, round cheek to-night as if with a swan’s-down puff.

“That’s a shabby thing to call a kiss!” said the embarrassed but exhilarated youth.

“Stop growling, you young cub, and be grateful; half a loaf is better than no bread,” was Lavendar’s comment as he watched the draggled and muddy but still charming Robinette up the stairway.