“My name is Everard,” he said, with a little hesitation and a quick flush of color. His face, which had always been refined in feature, had a delicacy that looked like ill-health, and as he pulled on his coat over his wet clothes he shivered slightly. Was it because he felt the chill, or only to call forth the sudden anxiety which appeared in Rosalind’s face? “Oh,” he said, “it was momentary. I shall take no harm.” “What can we do?” cried Rosalind, with alarm. “If it should make you ill! And you are here perhaps for the baths? and yet have plunged in without thought. What can we do? There is no carriage nor anything to be got. Oh, Mr. Everard! take pity upon me and hasten home.” “I will walk with you if you will let me.” “But we cannot go quick, the children are not able; and what if you catch cold! My aunt would never forgive me if I let you wait.” “There could be nothing improper,” he said hastily, “with the nurse and the children.” Rosalind felt the pain of this mistaken speech prick her like a pin-point. To think in your innermost consciousness that a man is “not a gentleman” is worse than anything else that can be said of him in English speech. She hesitated and was angry with herself, but yet her color rose high. “What I mean,” she said, with an indescribable, delicate pride, “is that you will take cold--you understand me, surely--you will take cold after being in the water. I beg you to go on without waiting, for the children cannot walk quickly.” “And you?” he said; still he did not seem to understand, but looked at her with a sort of delighted persuasion that she was avoiding the walk with him coyly, with that feminine withdrawal which leads a suitor on. “You are just as wet as I am. Could not we two push on and leave the children to follow?” Rosalind gave him a look which was full of almost despairing wonder. The mind and the words conveyed so different an impression from that made by the refined features and harmonious face. “Oh, please go away,” she said, “I am in misery to see you standing there so wet. My aunt will send to you to thank you. Oh, please go away! If you catch cold we will never forgive ourselves,” Rosalind cried, with an earnestness that brought tears to her eyes. “Miss Trevanion, that you should care--” Rosalind, in her heat and eagerness, made an imperious gesture, stamping her foot on the sand in passionate impatience. “Go, go!” she cried. “We owe you the children’s lives, and we shall not forget it--but go!” He hesitated. He did not believe nor understand her! He looked in her eyes wistfully, yet with a sort of smile, to know how much of it was true. Could any one who was a gentleman have so failed to apprehend her meaning? Yet it did gleam on him at length, and he obeyed her, though reluctantly, turning back half a dozen times in the first hundred yards to see if she were coming. At last a turn in the road hid him from her troubled eyes. CHAPTER XLII.