Again she repeated her command,--this time in a more peremptory tone, the same anxious note in her voice. “Please come, if daddy doesn't want you any more you must go home at once. I wouldn't have you take cold for--” she did not finish the sentence; something in his face told her that her solicitude might already have betrayed her. “Of course, I will go just as soon as you are rested a little, but you mustn't worry about me, Miss Ruth, I am as wet as a rat, I know, but I am that way half the time when it rains. These tarpaulins let in a lot of water--” here he lifted his arms so she could see the openings herself--“and then I got in over my boots trying to plug the holes in the sluiceway with some plank.” He was looking down into her eyes now. Never had he seen her so pretty. The exercise had made roses of her cheeks, and the up-turned face framed by the thatch of a bonnet bound with the veil, reminded him of a Madonna. “And is everything all right with daddy? And was there nobody in the shanties?” she went on. “Perhaps I might better try to get over where he is;--do you think I can? I would just like to tell him how glad I am it is no worse.” “Yes, if you change boots with me,” laughed Jack, determined to divert her mind; “I was nearly swamped getting back here. That is where most of this mud came from--” and Jack turned his long, clay-encrusted boot so that Ruth could see how large a section of the “fill” he had brought with him. Ruth began to laugh. There was no ostensible reason why she should laugh; there was nothing about Jack's make-up to cause it. Indeed, she thought he had never looked so handsome, even if his hair were plastered to his temples under his water-soaked hat and his clothes daubed with mud. And yet she did laugh:--At the way her veil got knotted under her chin,--so tightly knotted that Jack had to take both hands to loosen it, begging pardon for touching her throat, and hoping all the while that his clumsy fingers had not hurt her;--at the way her hat was crumpled, the flowers “never,--never, being of the slightest use to anybody again”; at her bedraggled skirts--“such a sight, and sopping wet.” And Jack laughed, too,--agreeing to everything she said, until she reached that stage in the conversation, never omitted on occasions of this kind, when she declared, arching her head, that she must look like a perfect fright, which Jack at once refuted exclaiming that he had never seen her look so--he was going to say “pretty,” but checked himself and substituted “well,” instead, adding, as he wiped off her ridiculously small boots, despite her protests, with his wet handkerchief,--that cloud-bursts were not such bad things, after all, now that he was to have the pleasure of escorting her home.