“I assure you, Miss Joyce, I didn’t know who you were at the time, when the blackguards seemed lazy about your parcel.”
“If you had known me, would that have made any difference, Mr. Bingham?” she asked laughingly.
“It would.”
“In what way?”
“I would have thrashed Lanty Kerrigan and have brought the parcel myself.” He threw so much earnestness into this that the red blood flushed up to the roots of Mary Joyce’s rich brown hair. “I must see to my tackle,” she said in a confused way.
“Are you an angler, Miss Joyce?”
“Look at my boots”—a pair of dainty, dumpy little things such as Cinderella must have worn on sloppy days when walking with the prince, with roguish little nails all over the soles crying, “Stamp on us; we like it,” and creamy laces fit for tying up bride-cake.
“By Jove!” exclaimed Percy Bingham, and that was all he was able to reach at that particular moment. He thought afterwards of all he could have said and—didn’t.
A walk of half a mile brought them to the Shauraunthurga, or “Boiling Caldron,” whose seething waters dashed from rock to rock, and boiled in many whirlpools as it rushed madly onwards to the wild Atlantic.
What did Bingham care about the fishing? Not a dump. He stood by her side, set up her cast, sorted her flies, spliced the top joint of her rod, and watched with feverish anxiety the eccentric movement of her gorgeous decoy, as it whirled hither and thither, now on the peat-brown waters, now in the soap-suds-like foam.