"I hope you will not think me rude, but perhaps you would not mind telling me whom I have had the pleasure of helping?"
"My name is Katherine Petrovitch," she answered, with a smile, and then as frankly returned his question. "And yours?"
"My name is Browne," he replied; and also smiling as he said it, he added: "I am Browne's Mimosa Soap, Fragrant and Antiseptic."
CHAPTER II
When Browne reached the yacht, after bidding good-bye to the girl he had rescued, he found his friends much exercised in their minds concerning him. They had themselves been overtaken by the fog, and very naturally they had supposed that their host, seeing it coming on, had returned to the yacht without waiting for them. Their surprise, therefore, when they arrived on board and found him still missing was scarcely to be wondered at. In consequence, when he descended the companion ladder and entered the drawing-room, he had to undergo a cross-examination as to his movements. Strangely enough, this solicitude for his welfare was far from being pleasing to him. He had made up his mind to say nothing about the adventure of the afternoon, and yet, as he soon discovered, it was difficult to account for the time he had spent ashore if he kept silence on the subject. Accordingly he made the best excuse that occurred to him, and by disclosing a half-truth induced them to suppose that he had followed their party towards the waterfall, and had in consequence been lost in the fog.
"It was scarcely kind of you to cause us so much anxiety," said Miss Verney in a low voice as he approached the piano at which she was seated. "I assure you we have been most concerned about you; and, if you had not come on board very soon, Captain Marsh and Mr. Foote were going ashore again in search of you."
"That would have been very kind of them," said Browne, dropping into an easy-chair; "but there was not the least necessity for it. I am quite capable of taking care of myself."
"Nasty things mountains," said Jimmy Foote to the company at large. "I don't trust 'em myself. I remember once on the Rigi going out with old Simeon Baynes, the American millionaire fellow, you know, and his daughter, the girl who married that Italian count who fought Constantovitch and was afterwards killed in Abyssinia. At one place we very nearly went over the edge, every man-jack of us, and I vowed I'd never do such a thing again. Fancy the irony of the position! After having been poverty-stricken all one's life, to drop through the air thirteen hundred feet in the company of over a million dollars. I'm perfectly certain of one thing, however: if it hadn't been for the girl's presence of mind I should not have been here to-day. As it was, she saved my life, and, until she married, I never could be sufficiently grateful to her."
"Only until she married!" said Lady Imogen, looking up from the novel she was reading. "How was it your gratitude did not last longer than that?"