Olwen, a prisoner enraptured with her chain, sat silent and still. She thought, "I suppose I ought to take my hand away. Oh, need I? No; I can't. He's only holding it to warm it, perhaps. And then if I took it away he might think I thought he thought he was _really_ holding it!" She sat in the boat that glided through that fairy mere of lambert waves, shimmering with green. Little shivers seemed to start in her elapsed hand and to run up her arm quick as wildfire, and spreading like wildfire through the whole of her slight frame. Yet she was now, as she had promised the Professor that she would be, "as warm as warm." Once she moved her hand a little in its prison, but that was only as a bird might stir and nestle in its cosy haunt. The man's clasp tightened a trifle, but she had made no effort to take away the hand that he was describing to himself as "a little bit of velvet." As she assured herself some time afterwards, "Well, how _could_ I? How can you possibly take your hand away from a man's who's only got one arm to hold you with?" The boat sped on ... and the thrills that trembled through the girl did not, surely, leave the man unstirred. "Well, what about it, Ross?" broke in the making-the-best-of-it voice of little Mr. Brown, resting at last on his oars. "What about another of those chocolates?" With one of his quickest movements Captain Ross's hand left the shadow of Olwen's cuff and grabbed the biggest chocolate walnut out of the box. He crammed it into the other young man's mouth as if it were a gag. Then, unseen, his hand sought the girl's again, found it, held it close. The boat sped on through the whispering wildfire.... CHAPTER XIV CLOUDS UPON THE CHARM "The burden of bright colours. Thou shalt see Gold tarnished, and the grey above the green." Swinburne. After an evening of ecstasy such as Olwen had lived through upon those iridescent waves, what could the girl expect? It is one of Fate's harshest rules that in one way or another we pay for our ecstasies. The more golden the moment the more dull and clouded must seem the hours that follow: and that is just because we have seen that magic green shimmer on the breaker's crest that the grey of these smooth waters looks to us so leaden. Ah, better to know the sadness of this than never to have set keel in any but the quiet waters! To have no reckoning to pay because no ecstasy has been ours to enjoy is surely the bitterest price that can be demanded of us.... But Olwen was too young to recognize this. So, when the next day she emerged bit by bit from her dream, she was sore and resentful to find all life at its flattest. To begin with (and, indeed, to go on with; for this was the whole leaven of discontent), Captain Ross encountered her as if there had been no magic voyage, no hand clasped in hand, no wildfire, no silent thrills between them. "Ah, good morrrrning, Miss Howel-Jones. Another beautiful day----"