“Still, you’d better sit down,” resumed the Englishman. “The Bacchanalian gentlemen in the boat which ran you down are still blundering about, and may quite probably cannon into us. And you don’t want to take a second chance of being shot out into the lake.”
“Indeed I don’t.” She sat down hastily. “I—I don’t really know how to thank you,” she began haltingly, after a moment. Somehow she felt curiously shy and tongue-tied with this man.
“Then don’t try,” he replied ungraciously.
This was hardly encouraging, but Ann returned to the charge with determination.
“I must,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for you I should certainly have been drowned.”
“Rather improbable,” he answered—as indifferently as though it really mattered very little whether she were or not. “With so many people close at hand, some one would have been sure to fish you out. You’d have got a wetting—and so would your unfortunate rescuer. That’s all. Still, I’m just as glad I saw what was going to happen. I prefer to keep a dry skin myself.”
“Oh! Then you would have jumped in after me?” asked Ann, with interest.
He sat down in the stern of the boat, his arm on the tiller, and regarded her contemplatively.
“I suppose so. A man has no choice when a woman chooses to go monkeying about in a boat and gets herself into difficulties.”
“‘Monkeying about in a boat!’” repeated Ann indignantly. “I suppose you’ll say next that I rammed my own boat and sank it!”