“It’s fine of you--” Something cut her praise curiously short, just as gunwale swept gunwale. “Come aboard,” said Miles. Sheepish, and suddenly flushed, he found himself out of all measure preoccupied with an unshipped oar. “Careful. Step in the middle,” he added mechanically. His outstretched hand met a warm, firm little grasp, in the same delighted instant that two ankles, quick and slender as the feathered ankles of mythology, whipped over into the bottom of the boat. “Make fast your painter,” he ordered, shipping his oar in a dream. “Make my what?” cried his passenger anxiously. He managed at last to look up, and saw her darting puzzled glances into the punt. Cold vapors wavered about her hair thinly, as though conquered and dispersed by lambent brightness. “Tie the rope,” he translated. “Oh, this!” She obeyed, her nimble fingers rosy with the cold, her shining head bent so zealously over the knot as to show but one brown cheek transparently aglow with exercise. Watching this with unbounded pleasure, he gave way. The punt fell behind, swung dimly into their wake; the rope rose taut and dripping; and as though satisfied with her knot, the girl suddenly faced him, brushing from her forehead an obstinate tendril of bright hair. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. “I don’t--I don’t know anything about boats.” Again a fragment of boyhood restored: he met that look of elfin gravity, under the wide circumflex of eyebrows, more formidable than bows bent against him. “How did you get lost?” he ventured in confusion; and, meaning kindness, was dismayed to hear the question ring like a rebuke. “Weir-poles--a whole lot drifted out of our cove,” she answered, with a flutter of the same confusion. “He had worked so hard--It was a pity to lose so many. I had to come out after them. He was--isn’t very well.” “Your father?” asked Miles. “Yes,” replied the girl uncertainly. Another flush, a deeper color in her cheeks, allowed him to guess at Abram’s illness. “No; I call him that, but--he’s all I have; and she was so good to me--his wife. She sent me to school winters, and wouldn’t let--as long as she lived--” Her words, lingering unfinished, her look penetrating the hidden distances of the fog, seemed to dismiss a memory down some long vista. “Were you afraid?” said Miles, between strokes. “Of course I was,” she laughed. Her instant change of mood, her glance swiftly returning to close quarters, but above all the radiant conflict about lips and eyes, the honest mischief and shy directness, struck him into a panic joy. No countenance had ever looked so quick with various meaning, so tremulous with color, so dangerously awake and alive, as her face now in this floating dawn, this cold, nebulous, elemental light of the sea mist. It was a discovery in his life, a mystery, and a power. He could have ferried her to the farthest continent.