A splash followed. Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink,
and put her handkerchief to her face.

"Good heavens! what did you do that for, Creedle?" said Giles,
sternly, and jumping up.

"'Tis how I do it when they baint here, maister," mildly
expostulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.

"Well, yes--but--" replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and
hoped none of it had gone into her eye.

"Oh no," she said. "Only a sprinkle on my face. It was nothing."

"Kiss it and make it well," gallantly observed Mr. Bawtree.

Miss Melbury blushed.

The timber-merchant said, quickly, "Oh, it is nothing! She must
bear these little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his
face something which said "I ought to have foreseen this."

Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not
quite liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such
people as Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in
dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In
his mind's eye, before the event, they had been the mere
background or padding of the scene, but somehow in reality they
were the most prominent personages there.