Captain Hasleton shut up his penknife and commenced tying the bundle of bulrushes together. "Ah, you may well ask that, Miss Devereux," he said, laughing; "it would take too long to narrate all the horrors I have faced in collecting them. First of all, endless frogs resented my intrusion by jumping up and croaking all round me. Then I stood in constant peril of a ducking. You should have heard the ice crack! And last, but by no means least, I've cut my finger. Nothing but half-a-dozen waltzes to-night will repay me." Maud laughed gaily. "Half-a-dozen? How grasping! I'll promise you two. That reminds me, Mr. Arbuthnot," she added, leaning forward on her muff and looking up at me, "we're going to dance to-night, and I've persuaded your sister and Mr. Holdern to come up to dinner. You will come, won't you?" I said something conventional to the effect that I should be delighted, and, raising my cap, was about to turn away. But she called me back. "How dreadfully tall you are, Mr. Arbuthnot! I have a private message for your sister. Do you think that you could bring yourself within whispering distance?" I stooped down till my heart beat to feel her soft breath on my cheek, and I felt a wild longing to seize hold of the slender, shapely hand that rested on my coat-sleeve. And these were the words which she whispered into my ear, half mischievously, half tenderly-- "Faint heart never won--anything, did it? Don't, you silly boy! Captain Hasleton will see you." And then she drew herself up and nodded, and with the hot colour burning my cheeks, and with leaping heart, I watched Captain Hasleton seize hold of the light hand-sledge and send it flying along the smooth surface of the lake round the sharp corner and out of sight. Then I turned and skated away in the opposite direction with those words ringing in my ears and a wild joy in my heart. The cold east wind seemed to me like the balmiest summer breeze, and the bare, desolate landscape stretching away in front seemed bathed in a softening golden light. For Maud loved me--or she was a flirt. Maud was a flirt--or she loved me. CHAPTER XXI RUPERT DEVEREUX If any one had told me that evening, as Marian and Holdern and I drew near to the great entrance of Devereux Court, that I was entering it for the last time for many years, I should probably have thought them mad. And yet so it was, for that night was a fateful one to me. Into foreign lands and far-away places I carried with me the memory of the stately greystone front, the majestic towers, the half-ruined battlements, the ivy-covered, ruined chapel, with its stained-glass windows, and the vast hall towering up to the vaulted roof. Of Devereux Court, of all these, I have said but little, for my story is rather a chronicle of events than a descriptive one. But they had made a great impression upon me, as was only natural; for would they not some day, if I chose to claim them, be mine?