"My dear child," she cried, extricating herself from the encircling arm, "_do_ let me look at you! I want to make sure that you are not injured. The boat upset, you say. Why, your clothes must be wringing wet!" Cynthia laughed. She had guessed why her chaperon wished to keep her literally at arm's length. She spread her skirts with a quick gesture that relieved an awkward situation. "Not a drop on my clothes," she said gleefully. "The water just touched the soles of my boots, but before you could say 'Jack Robinson' Fitzroy had whisked me out of the skiff--and landed me on dry land." "You were in shallow water, then?" put in the smiling proprietress. "Oh no, fairly deep. Fitzroy was up to his waist in the stream." "And the boat upset?" came the amazed chorus. "I didn't quite mean that. What actually happened was this. I discovered that the hour was rather late, and Fitzroy was rowing down stream at a great pace when some sunken thing, a tree-root he thinks, caught the side of the boat and started a plank. I was so taken by surprise that I should have sat right there and gone to the bottom with the boat, but Fitzroy jumped overboard straight away and hiked me out." Ready-tongued Cynthia was beginning to find detailed explanation rather difficult, and her speech reverted to the picturesque idioms of her native land. It was the happiest ruse she could have adopted. Everyone laughed at the notion of being "hiked out." None of her hearers knew quite what it meant, yet it covered the requisite ground, which was more than might have been achieved by explicit English. "Where did the accident take place?" asked the landlady. Cynthia was vague on this point, but when she told how the return journey was made, the pretty Welsh waitress hit on a theory. "In-deed to goot-ness, miss," she cried, "you wass be-tween the Garren River an' Huntsham Bridge. It iss a bad place, so it iss, however. Me an' my young man wass shoaled there once, we wass." Cynthia felt that her face and neck had grown positively scarlet, and she could have kissed the well-disposed landlady for entering on a voluble disquisition as to the tricks played by the Wye on those unaware of its peculiarities, especially at night. A general conversation broke out, but Mrs. Devar, rapidly regaining her spirits after enduring long hours of the horrible obsession that Medenham had run off with her heiress, noted that telltale blush. At present her object was to assist rather than embarrass, so with a fine air of motherly solicitude she asked: "Where did you leave Fitzroy?" "He saw preparations being made to send boats in search of us, and he went to stop them. Oh, here he is!"