"Oh, it's my Uncle. Do open the shutters, Uncle! I'm out here, with Mr. Brown and Captain Ross," explained Olwen, hurriedly. "It's--it's ever so early, you know! We were all just thinking of going for a little walk----" "No; I've got it," put in the unquenchable Mr. Brown. "What about a pull on the lagoon, to look at the phosphorescence? You too, Ross," he added, hospitably; guessing that Professor Howel-Jones was of an age that might allow its young nieces to go for moonlight rows in boats on lakes with two young men, but scarcely with one. "I saw a skiff drawn up by the jetty. You don't mind, Professor, do you?" "At this hour?" demurred the Professor, looking out into the light that made of his massive old head the summit of Mynedd Mawr in a snowy December. "For you to take your death of cold, Olwen _fach_, in the night air?" Little Olwen, pulling up her storm-collar, murmured appealingly above it. "Oh, _darling_! I shall be as warm as warm! Do let me go." She did not know that in her coaxing she was helped by a girl long dead. It was to a certain note in the voice that she had from her mother that the Professor ceded now. With a little nod he said, "Very well," and all but added "Mary." "Very well, Olwen _fach_. I trust you gentlemen not to keep her out long. I wish you a pleasant row; good night to you, good night!" And he went in. "Come on; let's make a dash for it," said young Brown. He led the way; followed by Olwen and Captain Ross, the latter in a worse temper than he had been in since he left the hospital. "Jump in," said Mr. Brown, as they came up to the little empty skiff moored at the foot of the jetty. In the skiff little Mr. Brown, cheerfully resigned to doing all the work, took both oars; as he would naïvely have said, he rather fancied himself in a boat. He pushed his shirt-sleeves up above a pair of short but neatly-turned forearms, and as he rowed on that foreign lagoon margined by that French sea-wall, his cheerful chatter was all of the Thames above Richmond, of sunny Sundays and of parties on Eel-Pie Island. The two in the stern sat rather silently, letting him talk; Captain Ross sulking as he would never have admitted he sulked, Olwen uttering now and again a little "Ah" of delight at the phosphorescence on the water. For it was wonderful, that sea that flamed as they pushed out into it. The boat's keel cut into the shimmer of pale green as into a field of glow-worms; it lighted up to left and right, blazing, dying down, rekindling fitfully as love itself; raining in spangles from the oars, dripping in jewels from Olwen's fingers as she dipped them over the side of the boat. "Trim, Miss Olwen," said Mr. Brown, jerking his bullet head. "A bit nearer to Ross, if you don't mind." Olwen moved; in the softly rocking boat overbalancing a trifle, she bumped against something hard and angular on the seat close to her companion. It felt like a camera or a book. "Oh," she said, "did I knock you, Captain Ross?"