Prudence! John sat and stared through the darkness in a futile effort to see her face. A water rat swam past, cleaving a fan-shaped trail. The stars winked down at him. In the little island a bird moved among the reeds. Prudence! Was she referring...? Had she meant...? Did she allude...? He came to life and dug the paddle into the water. Of course she wasn't. Of course she hadn't. Of course she didn't. In that little episode on the path, he had behaved exactly as he should have behaved. If he behaved as he should not have behaved, if he had behaved as that old flint-axe and bearskin John of the Stone Age would have had him behave, he would have behaved unpardonably. The swift intake of the breath and the "Oh, why must you spoil everything like this?"--that was what would have been the result of listening to the advice of a bounder of an ancestor who might have been a social success in his day, but naturally didn't understand the niceties of modern civilization. Nevertheless, he worked with unnecessary vigour at the paddle, calling down another rebuke from his passenger. "Don't race along like that. Are you trying to hint that you want to get this over as quickly as you can and send me home to bed?" "No," was all John could find to say. "Well, I suppose I ought to be thinking of bed. I'll tell you what. We'll do the thing in style. The Return by Water. You can take me out into the Skirme and down as far as the bridge and drop me there. Or is that too big a programme? You're probably tired." John had motored two hundred miles that day, but he had never felt less tired. His view was that he wished they could row on for ever. "All right," he said. "Push on, then," said Pat. "Only do go slowly. I want to enjoy this. I don't want to whizz by all the old landmarks. How far to Ghost Corner?" "It's just ahead." "Well, take it easy." The moat proper was a narrow strip of water which encircled the Hall and had been placed there by the first Carmody in the days when householders believed in making things difficult for their visitors. With the gradual spread of peace throughout the land its original purposes had been forgotten, and later members of the family had broadened it and added to it and tinkered with it and sprinkled it with little islands with the view of converting it into something resembling as nearly as possible an ornamental lake. Apparently it came to an end at the spot where a mass of yew trees stood forbiddingly in a gloomy row, that haunted spot which Pat as a child had named Ghost Corner; but if you approached this corner intrepidly you found there a narrow channel. Which navigated, you came into a winding stream which led past meadows and under bridges to the upper reaches of the Skirme. "How old were you, Johnnie, when you were first brave enough to come past Ghost Corner at night all by yourself?" asked Pat. "Sixteen." "I bet you were much more than that." "I did it on my sixteenth birthday."