“Make fast your painter,” he ordered, shipping his oar in a dream.
“Make my what?” cried his passenger anxiously. He managed at last to look up, and saw her darting puzzled glances into the punt. Cold vapors wavered about her hair thinly, as though conquered and dispersed by lambent brightness.
“Tie the rope,” he translated.
“Oh, this!” She obeyed, her nimble fingers rosy with the cold, her shining head bent so zealously over the knot as to show but one brown cheek transparently aglow with exercise.
Watching this with unbounded pleasure, he gave way. The punt fell behind, swung dimly into their wake; the rope rose taut and dripping; and as though satisfied with her knot, the girl suddenly faced him, brushing from her forehead an obstinate tendril of bright hair.
“Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. “I don’t—I don’t know anything about boats.”
Again a fragment of boyhood restored: he met that look of elfin gravity, under the wide circumflex of eyebrows, more formidable than bows bent against him.
“How did you get lost?” he ventured in confusion; and, meaning kindness, was dismayed to hear the question ring like a rebuke.
“Weir-poles—a whole lot drifted out of our cove,” she answered, with a flutter of the same confusion. “He had worked so hard—It was a pity to lose so many. I had to come out after them. He was—isn’t very well.”
“Your father?” asked Miles.