The procession started at four o’clock to make the tour of the lake, and the plaudits that greeted the swan barge everywhere were loud and prolonged. But the engine of the launch worked badly, and once the engineer was forced to run ashore to see what he could do at easing matters.
This put them behind, and when they started on again it was already beginning to grow dark.
The wind was rising too, and presently the boat was tossing in quite a sea. Radnor took off his coat and insisted on wrapping it around the “Venus,” and they both cowered behind the windward wing of the Swan to escape as much as possible the pelting rain that now began to descend.
Not a very romantic situation truly, but nevertheless Radnor found in it his perilous turning point. Olive was so brave, so patient, so confident in his ability to bring them safely into port, showed to him, in short, a side of her character that had not yet been presented to him, that—well, he went down before it as so many men before him have done before their fates, and when he helped a wet, bedraggled Venus out of the boat at the Lorimac pier he realized that the sooner he got out of the Adirondack woods the better for his peace of mind.
It had all come on him like a lightning stroke, or, as he preferred to compare it himself, with the swiftness of the flash in night time photography. He had gone on so joyously, so confidently, with no thought beyond the contentment of the present.
“But why should I not go on and be happy?” he asked himself that night as he tried calmly to review the situation.
To be sure there were Miss Bellman’s millions, contrasted with his own poverty. The world would be sure to talk, but then he would wait and work, and perhaps some day he would feel that the gulf between them was not too wide to be spanned by their clasped hands. And with this ravishing possibility for his last waking thought he fell asleep.
He woke early, and with the new hope strong within him, he felt he could not endure the confinement of four walls until his customary rising time. He dressed and went out to walk beside the lake, which now reflected back the overshadowing hills from a mirror-like surface that it seemed could not be the same on which the swan boat had been so rudely tossed but yesterday. He had never seen the Lorimac so peaceful; all was quiet in the early morning; even the birds seemed to have hushed their music for the moment. There was not a sound but the tiniest lap of the ripples against the stony shore at his feet and—yes, here was a jarring discord overhead as his walk brought him just beneath the summer house.
Two French nursemaids were sitting there, talking in their own language, in which Radnor was well versed.
“See there!” one of them exclaimed. “Here he comes now. Madame Barnes arranged it well, did she not, that they go off in the swan boat? Such a fortune is not to be trapped every day, and as she couldn’t marry it herself, she wanted to have it in the family somewhere. It’s the talk of the house how she’s been playing off the handsome cousin for the——”