“Can you hang on?” he queried cheerfully.
She replied in like tones, “How long?”—and suppressed her inner doubts.
“Till we float ashore. I can’t do anything while I’m on the keel, and mustn’t move off it. How much of you is immersed?”
“Up to the knees.”
The boat hovered about uncertainly in midstream. There was no one in sight, and no sound but the breeze shivering the rushes. A fish leapt shining from the water, and plunged again into a circle of ripples. From round the next bend still drifted snatches of the ‘Ragtime Goblin Man’; evidently John had not yet spoken. Some distance over the land, yet not so far but that they should distinctly have heard the throb and clangour, a train passed in a linked blur of lights; passed noiselessly, like a phantom train. Peter, watching it, wished passionately that she might hear it whistle, as reassurance that she herself was real, and not a pictured castaway upon a badly drawn bit of wreckage.
At last they floated into a mud-bank; and were able thence to wade ashore.
Peter waited for Stuart to display extreme anxiety as to her degree of wetness, to burst into pæans of praise on her bravery and calmness in the face of danger, and finally to mutter with white young jaws, “I shall never forgive myself—never!”
Stuart said curtly: “Shivery? No? That’s all right; d’you feel equal to giving me a hand with the sail? We must lug it up somehow,”—happily convinced that by thus increasing the wind to the shorn lamb, he was treating the lamb in the spirit it most desired.
And as they tugged and hauled in the dim light at that most obstinate of all foes, a water-logged sail, Peter played up gallantly to his call upon that other Peter; the one she had carefully cut according to his measurements. Round her lips hovered a rather tremulous smile at the manner in which she was thus for a second time required to pay for her audacity in playing at God.