"I should like it above all things," replied Miss Lloyd.
"I wish Charley were here to take us for a row," alluding to her brother. "How coquettish my boat looks this afternoon! How she seems to woo us to take her out for a spin!"
Gerald lifted his hat. "I believe that I can handle a pair of oars as awkwardly as most people," he said, with a smile. "If you will trust yourselves to my care, I will promise to bring you back--either alive or dead."
The young ladies vowed that it would be delicious. The elder ladies disapproved faintly, on the ground that there would be a cold breeze on the river, but were overruled. Mr. Cromer waddled back to the house to get some shawls and wraps, and Gerald handed the young ladies into the boat.
In the result, however, Miss Cromer had to be left behind. At the last moment she was seized with her old complaint, palpitation of the heart, and her mother would not let her go. Eleanor would have stayed with her, but both Mr. and Mrs. Cromer insisted upon her going. It did not require much persuasion to make Gerald take them at their word. Eleanor had hardly ceased protesting that she would much rather stay with Cora, when she found herself in the middle of the stream, and all conversation with those on shore at an end.
"Now, Miss Lloyd, will you kindly take charge of the tiller ropes?" said Gerald, decisively. "I presume you know how to use them?"
"I ought to know," said Eleanor. "I had a great deal of practice with them when poor papa and I used to go out boating together."
It would not be high water for half an hour, and the tide was still running up strongly. Gerald put the boat's head up stream, and pulled gently along towards Twickenham. He blessed the happy fortune that, for one delicious hour, had given him Eleanor all to himself. But now that the opportunity was his, what should he talk to her about? He felt that he ought to be at once witty and tender; that now, if ever, he ought to rise above the commonplace level of everyday conversation. He felt all this, and yet he felt, at the same time, that he had nothing to say. If he might only have opened the floodgates of his heart, then, indeed, there would have been no lack of words--no necessity to hunt here and there in his brain for something to talk about. It is true that he might have begun about the weather, or some other equally simple topic; but, then, any nincompoop could have done that, and to-day he wanted so particularly to shine in the eyes of his goddess! But before long it became quite evident that he was not to shine to-day. He must rest contentedly on the level of the nincompoops, and trust to his good fortune that Miss Lloyd would not find out that he was a bigger donkey than the rest of the gentlemen who were in the habit of laying themselves out to fascinate her.
But Miss Lloyd herself seemed to have very little to say this afternoon. It seemed pleasure enough just then to sit quietly in the sweet sunshine and dip her ungloved hand now and again in the cool ripples of the tide.
"Have you ever been as far up the Thames as this before?" asked Gerald at last, in sheer desperation.