“There’s one thing I could do, Miss Susan,” he replied, “that is if you have no objection; I can carry you and Miss Morven through the water, and put you out on the road high and dry. I think I might get a trap in Swingford village; you could drive home, and I’ll bring the car along to-morrow. It seems the only thing to be done.”
After this suggestion there ensued a long and animated consultation between aunt and niece; at last Miss Susan, raising her voice, said—
“Very well, Owen, I see no alternative; you can take me first—I am a light weight.”
Owen now descended from his place and waded to the door, which he opened.
“All right, Miss Susan, you may depend on me. I won’t drop you.”
“How am I to manage?” she asked shame-facedly.
“It’s quite easy! Just put your arms round my neck, miss, and hold tight.”
After a moment’s coy reluctance—it was the first time in her life she had ever put her arms round a man’s neck—Miss Susan timidly embraced him.
“Hold on,” he commanded, and, lifting her bodily out of the car as if she were a child, waded away, striding and splashing up to his middle in water. When he had carefully deposited her on dry land, the chauffeur returned for the young lady, who, it must be confessed, awaited him with a wildly beating heart; it seemed to her that in his air there was actually a look of mastery and triumph. If he had been an ordinary chauffeur, such as the Woolcocks’, she would not have minded; but this man—this Lieutenant Wynyard, who was of her own class—oh, how she shrank from this enforced ordeal; she felt deeply reluctant and ashamed.
However, she asked no questions, made no hysterical protests, but rose as he appeared, put her arms on his shoulders—though she would rather have waded up to her neck—and was borne into the stream, upon which a laggard moon had recently arisen. Little, little did Aurea guess that, as she leant her head upon his leather shoulder, how Owen, the chauffeur, had to fight with a frantic, almost overmastering, desire to kiss her! And what an outcry there would have been, not merely from the young lady herself, but the sole witness, her maiden aunt!