"Then you'll force me to put in immediately," she said, with an angry
reversal of tactics,--"and subject me to the humiliation of being seen
with you. What a coward!"

"Humiliation!" Dalhousie repeated, flushing vividly. "You say that?"

"Can't you understand that it would be? Are you really so stupid?
Haven't you learned yet that I don't ever want anything more to do
with you?..."

Such remarks brought action and reaction. The lad's look must have
warned Miss Heth that all this went rather far. In fact, she began a
sort of retraction, a hurried little soothing away of her impolitic and
fairly conclusive remarks. But Dalhousie interrupted her, rising
unsteadily in the boat, his young face quite strange and wild.

Who would scrutinize the dying flickers of last summer's flirtation? All
that mattered was only too well seen from the shore.

It was the smallest of the rickey-drinkers who bruited the mishap
abroad, his eye having happened to stray through a slit between a
cottage-side and a boat-house. At this time, with the approach of
evening coolness, the hotel piazza was filling up a little; and at the
man's word, the place was instantly in a turmoil.

There started, in fact, all the horrid rigors of amateur rescue work: of
which the least said the soonest mended. It was presently noted by some
coolhead that the renter of boats, having seen the disaster first, had
already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could