Stella hurried Frank across the meadows, a rather difficult task, as he would insist upon talking, his teeth chattering, and his clothes dripping.
"What a splendid fellow, Stella! What a happy girl you ought to be—you are!"
"Perhaps I am," assented Stella, with a little smile; "but do you make haste, Frank! Can't you run any faster? I'll race you to the lane!"
"No, you won't," he retorted cheerfully. "You run like a greyhound at the best of times, and now I seem to have got a couple of tons clinging to me, you'd beat me hollow. But, Stella! think of him plunging off the beam! Many a man would have been satisfied to jump off the bank; if he had, he wouldn't have saved me! He knew that; and he made nothing of it, nothing! And that is the man they call a dandy and a fop!"
"Never mind what they call him, but run!" implored Stella.
"I don't know any other man who could have done it," he went on, his teeth chattering; "and how friendly and jolly he was, calling me Frank and telling me to call him Leycester! Stella, what a lucky girl you are; but he is not a bit too good for you after all! No one is too good for you! And he does love you, Stella; I could see it by the way he looked at you, and you thought to hide it, and that I shouldn't see it. Did you think I was a muff?"
"I think you will be laid up with a bad cold, sir, if you don't run!" said Stella. "What will uncle say?"
Frank stopped short and his face paled; he seemed to shrink.
"My father must know nothing about it," he said. "Don't tell him, Stella; I will get in the back way and change. Don't tell him!"