“I hope,” he said, “that you may perhaps remember I once saw you at Highcourt in the old days, in a little difficulty with a boat. This was scarcely more than that.”
“I recollect,” she said, her breath coming fast; “you were very kind—and now— Oh, this is a great deal more; I owe you—their lives.”
“Pray don’t say so. It was nothing—any one would have done it, even if there had been a great deal more to do, but there was nothing; it was little more than wading.” Then he took his coat from her hand, which she had been holding all the time. “It is far more—it is too much that you should have carried my coat, Miss Trevanion. It is more than a reward.”
She had thought of the face so often, the eyes fixed upon her, and had forgotten what doubts had visited her mind when she saw him before. Now, when she met the gaze of those eyes again, all her doubts came back. There was a faint internal struggle, even while she remembered that he had saved the lives of the children. “I know,” she said, recollecting herself, “that we have met before, and that I had other things to thank you for, though nothing like this. But you must forgive me, for I don’t know your name.”
“My name is Everard,” he said, with a little hesitation and a quick flush of color. His face, which had always been refined in feature, had a delicacy that looked like ill-health, and as he pulled on his coat over his wet clothes he shivered slightly. Was it because he felt the chill, or only to call forth the sudden anxiety which appeared in Rosalind’s face? “Oh,” he said, “it was momentary. I shall take no harm.”
“What can we do?” cried Rosalind, with alarm. “If it should make you ill! And you are here perhaps for the baths? and yet have plunged in without thought. What can we do? There is no carriage nor anything to be got. Oh, Mr. Everard! take pity upon me and hasten home.”
“I will walk with you if you will let me.”
“But we cannot go quick, the children are not able; and what if you catch cold! My aunt would never forgive me if I let you wait.”
“There could be nothing improper,” he said hastily, “with the nurse and the children.”
Rosalind felt the pain of this mistaken speech prick her like a pin-point. To think in your innermost consciousness that a man is “not a gentleman” is worse than anything else that can be said of him in English speech. She hesitated and was angry with herself, but yet her color rose high. “What I mean,” she said, with an indescribable, delicate pride, “is that you will take cold—you understand me, surely—you will take cold after being in the water. I beg you to go on without waiting, for the children cannot walk quickly.”