"Must I ask madam?" he queried, dubiously.
She laughed. "No. There now, Sambo, run away. No, I can go without asking her."
Very gently Deborah put away the child who still clung to her skirts, and started off, beside her companion, towards the river. Virginia and Sir Charles, from the portico, saw them pass the shrubbery. Fairfield repressed an exclamation. He would have given much to have been in the boy's place; and Virginia, catching a glimpse of his face, knew it, but was silent.
"I've got that Frencher—de Mailly—in the boat," observed Charles, as if offering a bit of off-hand information. "I like him, and he asked to come. What's the matter?"
Deborah had stopped short in her walk. "He there!" she cried, looking anxiously at her rumpled dress, knowing that her hair was all awry, and beginning to pull down the sleeves that were rolled to her shoulders. "Oh, you might have told me! How could you have let me come looking so?"
"You didn't mind me, though," returned Charles, not over-pleasantly. "Come, let the sleeves stay up, and don't bother with your hair. You're a thousand times prettier so, if that's what you want."
Deborah looked up at the boy with a little, mischievous smile. "I know that I'm better so. That's why I let it stay—for you," she said; and Charles, near enough to manhood to make the inference, had a momentary impulse to fall then and there at her feet. He did not guess, however, why the added color had come into Deborah's cheeks, or that there was a quick tremor at her heart as they approached the boat.
The wharf belonging to the Trevor place was hidden from the house by the foliage of the peach-orchard on the river-bank. Claude de Mailly, waiting in the little pinnace, beheld the two figures approaching him among the trees, and made his way along the bowsprit that he might help the young girl into the boat. He bowed gravely as she came along the pier, regarding her dishevelment of attire in surprise as well as admiration. It was but yesterday noon that he had seen her in very different state, and had thought her charming then. But now—! She accepted his proffered hand, and stepped carefully past the boom and down into the pinnace, though Charles had never seen her do such a thing before. Usually she leaped past him and was at the tiller before he could cast the painter off.
"Better let me take the steering to-day, Deborah," observed Charles, as they swung away from the dock.
"Oh—does mademoiselle herself steer at times?" asked Claude, with the quaintly twisted s's and r's that Deborah loved to hear.