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“I shouldn’t have thought he could have stirred in the morning,” Rulledge employed Halson’s pause to say.

“Well, this beaver had to,” Halson said. “He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him.”

“What!” Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and Wanhope’s eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.

“She came right towards him. ‘Mr. Braybridge,’ says she, ‘I couldn’t let you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn’t choose to have these people laughing at the notion of my having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn’t bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they’d have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don’t you see?’ Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and little. He said, ‘It would have seemed rather absurd,’ and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot.”

“It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the station,” Minver cynically suggested.

“Groom nothing!” Halson returned with spirit. “She paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station.”

“Jove!” Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.

“She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of praise–it made Braybridge feel awfully flat–and ran back through the bushes to the boat-landing, and–that was the last he saw of her till he met her in town this fall.”

“And when–and when–did he offer himself?” Rulledge entreated, breathlessly. “How–“

“Yes, that’s the point, Halson,” Minver interposed. “Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear him out.”

Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson’s answer even for the sake of righting himself.

“I have heard,” Minver went on, “that Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other shore for her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself.” We others stared at Minver in astonishment. Halson glanced covertly towards him with his gay eyes. “Then that wasn’t true?”

“How did you hear it?” Halson asked.

“Oh, never mind. Is it true?”

“Well, I know there’s that version,” Halson said, evasively. “The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer–the when and the how–I don’t know that I’m exactly at liberty to say.”

“I don’t see why,” Minver urged. “You might stretch a point for Rulledge’s sake.”

Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive passage of his eye over Rulledge’s intense face. “There was something rather nice happened after–But, really, now!”

“Oh, go on!” Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.

“I haven’t the right–Well, I suppose I’m on safe ground here? It won’t go any further, of course; and it was so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge–he’d followed her down to the shore of the lake–found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and called back: ‘Never mind. I can’t return for it now.’ Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and she said ‘Yes,’ over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and said: ‘No, no, you mustn’t, you mustn’t! You can send it to me.’ He asked where, and she said: ‘In New York–in the fall–at the Walholland.’ Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her–she was paddling on again–‘May I bring it?’ and she called over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was enough: ‘If you can’t get any one to bring it for you.’ The words barely reached him, but he’d have caught them if they’d been whispered; and he watched her across the lake and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in time.”