Gilead wished to find that this boat was abandoned also. There was not a soul to be seen or heard anywhere; he liked to think that the place was utterly given over to Autumn and its fragrant silences. But in that he was to be disappointed. As he leaned, half hypnotised, watching the running water, and conscious of the pale green oblong of the little houseboat coming indistinctly into his field of vision, of a sudden something moving there caught his attention, and he raised his head. A man in grey flannels and a low-brimmed Panama hat was stepping from its side into a rowing skiff, and the next moment he had cast off and was pulling towards the bridge. As the boat approached, Gilead saw that there was a woman seated in her stern. He had not observed her enter, and was quite startled for the moment. But the next, he reflected that his abstraction might easily account for the mistake, and he smiled over his own befooling. But the smile, in the very instant of its birth, withered from his lips. The skiff came on fast, urged by muscular, one might have thought furious arms, and as its occupants forged into clear range, he saw bare arms, and a bare neck, and a black mushroom-shaped hat with cherries in it. His heart seemed to leap so that it left a physical pain. He stood rigid, preparing for the charge; and the next moment the boat had swept under the bridge, carrying with and in it the apparition of last night. With its vanishing, nerve returned to him. He hurried across the road to see the boat shoot from the further side; yet, quick as he was, the rower’s energy was so great that it was already three times its own length beyond. As he caught at the railing, the man, as if moved by some telepathic instinct, lifted his face and saw him. He stopped on the instant, resting on his sculls. A minute must have passed thus while they regarded one another, each perfectly still in his place. Neither did the figure of the girl, now with its back to Gilead, make the least movement. The boat, with the way on it, continued to float up-stream; the face of the staring man grew smaller and less distinct; but it was always to Gilead a stiff blotch of yellow, like the face of a rigid corpse. He could not have said why it struck him thus, but so it did. It was a not uncomely face, of the strong blunt-featured type, in itself. The man had looked young, though past his first youth--a muscular, compact fellow, with curly dark hair and a hint of swagger and vulgarity. The cock of his hat, the brilliant scarf about his waist, confessed the bounder; yet what did a bounder on the river in late-September? Something redeeming, the watcher hoped and prayed. Yet there had seemed little that was human in that face. It had contrasted oddly with the pink and white of the girl’s, just glimpsed in passing. The apparition’s was the reassuring one of the two.