"They are sending out a search party," he said. "I must go and stop them. You run on to the hotel, Miss Vanrenen. Good-night! I shall give you an extra hour to-morrow." She hesitated the fraction of a second. Then she extended a hand. "Good-night," she murmured. "After all, I have had a real lovely time." Then she was gone, and Medenham turned to thank the hotel servants and others who were going to the rescue. "I wonder what the guv'nor will say when he sees Cynthia," he thought, with the smile on his face of the lover who deems his lady peerless among her sex. He recalled that moment before many days had passed, and his reflections then took a new guise, for not all the knowledge and all the experience a man may gather can avail him a whit to forecast the future when Fate is spinning her complex web. CHAPTER X THE HIDDEN FOUNTS OF EVIL It was a flushed and somewhat breathless Cynthia who ran into the quiet country hotel at an hour when the Licensing Laws of Britain have ordained that quiet country hotels shall be closed. But even the laws of the Medes and Persians, which altered not, must have bulged a little at times under the pressure of circumstances. The daughter of an American millionaire could not be reported as "missing" without a buzz of commotion being aroused in that secluded valley. As a matter of fact, no one in the house dreamed of going to bed until her disappearance was accounted for, one way or the other. Mrs. Devar, now really woebegone, screamed shrilly at sight of her. The lady's nerves were in a parlous condition--"on a raw edge" was her own phrase--and the relief of seeing her errant charge again was so great that the shriek merged into a sob. "Oh, my dear, my dear!" she wept, "what a shock you have given me! I thought you were gone!" "Not so bad as that," was the contrite answer. Cynthia interpreted "gone" as meaning "dead," and naturally read into the other woman's anxiety her own knowledge of the disaster to the boat. "We had a bit of an upset--that is all--and the bread always flops to the floor buttered side down, doesn't it? So we had to struggle ashore on the wrong bank. It couldn't be helped--that is, the accident couldn't--but I ought not to have been on the river at such a late hour. Do forgive me, dear Mrs. Devar!" By this time the girl's left arm was around her friend's portly form; in her intense eagerness to assuage Mrs. Devar's agitation she began to stroke her hair with the disengaged hand. A deeply sympathetic landlady, a number of servants, and most of the feminine guests in the hotel--all the men were down on the quay--had gathered to murmur their congratulations; but Mrs. Devar, dismayed by Cynthia's action, which might have brought about a catastrophe, revived with phenomenal suddenness.