It was at least an hour since Nasmyth had last seen their companions considerably lower down the river. He and Miss Hamilton had pushed on ahead of them into the Bush, which was a thing they had fallen into the habit of doing. The girl sat down on a boulder and seemed to be listening, but there was nothing to indicate the presence of any of the party. Except for the murmur of the river and the sighing among the pine-sprays high overhead, the Bush was very still, but it seemed to Nasmyth that there was more wind than there had been.
“I suppose we had better go back to them,” observed the girl. The manner in which she spoke conveyed the impression that she would have been more or less contented to stay where she was with him; but next moment she added: “After all, they have the lunch with them, and it must have been seven o’clock when we breakfasted.”
“Yes,” said Nasmyth, “I think it was. Still, until this minute I had quite forgotten it.”
“I certainly hadn’t,” said Violet Hamilton. “I don’t think I ever had breakfast at seven o’clock in my life until this morning.”
The fact had its significance to Nasmyth. It was one of the many little things that emphasized the difference between his life and hers, but he brushed it out of his mind, and they went back together down the waterside. Their progress was slow, for there was no trail at all, and while they laboriously plodded over the shingle, or crept in and out among the thickets, the wail of the breeze grew louder. Half an hour had passed when the faint hoot of the Tillicum’s whistle reached them among the trees.
“What can the skipper be whistling for?” asked the girl.
“I fancy the wind is setting inshore moderately fresh, and he wants us to come off before it roughens the water,” said Nasmyth.
They went on as fast as possible after that, though it was remarkably rough travelling; but they saw no sign of their companions, and the whistle, which had shrieked again, was silent, which evidently meant that the gig had already gone off. When they reached the inlet the river fell into, and found only the Tillicum’s dinghy lying on the shingle, Nasmyth, looking down the lane of smooth green water somewhat anxiously, noticed that the sea was flecked with white. The Tillicum, as he remembered, was also lying well out from the beach.
“We had better get off at once,” he said. “The breeze is freshening, and this dinghy isn’t very big.”