She shook her head with a little hesitation.
“I can’t think why he’s gone,” she murmured uneasily.
And then, as if involuntarily, she threw a sidelong look at Bayre.
Southerley seized the occasion of her hesitation, and hailing a boatman, who was busy with a line in a small craft on the water below, he hastily made his bargain; and dispensing, after some argument, with the services of the owner, hoisted the lug sail and started in pursuit of the man with the pipe and the peaked cap. The pretty girl in the fisher cap looked the least little bit disconcerted on perceiving that the broad-shouldered young stranger with the red face and the deep voice was as good as his word. Instead of the admiration with which poor Southerley flattered himself that she was regarding his efforts, she watched him hoist the sail, and, with a slight frown of distress, said, in a low voice,—
“Why did he do it? He’ll be drowned to a certainty! It’s very dangerous to go out here without knowing something of the currents.”
“Oh, he can swim,” said Bayre, with indifference.
And Southerley’s other friend added gallantly,—
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind being drowned while he was doing you a service, mademoiselle.”
“But he isn’t!” said she, slowly, turning upon Repton a pair of wide-open brown eyes. “If you knew old Mr Bayre”—and again she glanced at the young man of that name—“you’d know that it is no service to anybody to try to persuade him to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”
His wife, to a certainty! thought Repton, cynically.