When Daphne took up a new thing it was a passion with her. She was at the exuberant age when all fresh fancies are fevers. She had had her fever for water-colours, for battledore and shuttlecock, for crewel-work. She had risen at daybreak to pursue each new delight: but this fancy for the boat was the most intense of all her fevers, for the love of the river was a love dating from infancy, and she had never been able to gratify it thoroughly until now. Every evening in the billiard-room she addressed the same prayer to Edgar Turchill, when she bade him good-night: ‘Come as early as you can to-morrow morning, please.’ And to do her pleasure the Squire of Hawksyard rose at cockcrow and rode six miles in the dewy morning, so as to be at the boat-house in Sir Vernon’s meadow before Arden church clock struck seven. Let him be there as early as he might Daphne was always waiting for him, fresh as the morning, in her dark blue linen gown and sailor hat, the sleeves tucked up to the elbow to give free play to her supple wrists, her arms lily-white in spite of wind and weather. ‘It’s much too good of you,’ said she, in her careless way, not ungrateful, but with the air of a girl who thinks men were created to wait upon her. ‘How very early you must have been up!’ ‘Not so much earlier than you. It is only an hour’s ride from Hawksyard, even when I take it gently.’ ‘And you have had no breakfast, I daresay.’ ‘I have had nothing since the tumbler of St. Galmier you poured out for me in the billiard-room last night.’ ‘Poor—dear—soul!’ sighed Daphne, with a pause after each word. ‘How quite too shocking! We most institute a gipsy tea-kettle. This kind of thing shall not occur again.’ She looked at him with her loveliest smile, as much as to say: ‘I have made you my slave, but I mean your bondage to be pleasant.’ When he came to the boat-house next morning he found a kettle singing gaily on a rakish-looking gipsy-stove, a table laid for breakfast inside the boat-house, a smoking dish of eggs and bacon, and the faithful Bink doing butler, rough and rustic, but devoted. ‘I wonder whether she has read Don Juan?’ thought Edgar. The water, the gipsy breakfast, the sweet face smiling at him, reminded him of an episode in that poem. ‘Were I shipwrecked to-morrow I would not wish to awaken in a fairer paradise,’ he said to himself, while Bink adjusted a camp-stool for him, breathing his hardest all the time. ‘This is a delicious surprise,’ he exclaimed. ‘The eggs and bacon?’ ‘No; the privilege of a _tête-à-tête_ breakfast with you.’