"I'm thinking," said Joan, her eyes round and grave with astonishment, "how you seem always to have been here."
He laughed, his color high. His face, Joan thought, was much too young and vivid for anybody's father. Their eyes met in new and difficult readjustment and Kenny, his heart turbulent, turned back to the punt.
It was in his mind gallantly to scull the thing across. The announcement brought Joan to the edge of the water in a panic.
"You'd scull us both into a rock!" she exclaimed. "The river is full of them. I know the best way over."
"Professional jealousy!" retorted Kenny, his eyes droll and tender. "I suppose you belong to the ferryman's union." He dropped his knapsack into the boat and busied himself with the painter. "If the boat had two oars," he told her laughing, "or I one arm, I know I could manage. As it is, one oar and two arms—"
"It's much better," said Joan sensibly, "than two oars and one arm. Please get in."
She went to the stern and stood there, waiting, one hand upon the oar. Fascinated, Kenny climbed in.
What a ferryman! he mused as Joan sculled the punt from shore. What a gown and what a background! The old brocade, flapping in the wind, was gold like the afterglow behind the gables and the soft, haunting shadows in the girl's eyes and hair. What an ecstasy of unreality! Boat and ferryman seemed some exquisite animate medallion of another age.
Garry could have told him it was the way he saw his pictures, romantic in his utter abandon, but Garry was not there and Kenny with his head in the clouds rushed on to his doom. The punt was a fairy boat sailing him over a silver river to Hy Brazil, the Isle of Delight. Ah! Hy Brazil! You saw it on clear days and it receded when you followed. It was a melancholy thought and true. The madness never lasted.
There are those for whom the present is merely anticipation of the future or reminiscence of the past. Kenny had the supreme gift of living intensely and joyously in the present and the present for him shone in the soft brown eyes of the ferryman in the stern. Past and future he shrugged to the winds. For he was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery. Yes, surely to mystery! Mystery enough for any Celt in the battered horn, the ferry and the ferryman yonder in the old-time gown.