The situation which five minutes ago was so appalling had quite lost its horror; it was no longer unfaceable. Had Maud been told that morning that in the inscrutable decrees of Fate she was going to be caught poaching before lunch, she would have wished the earth to open and swallow her sooner than that anything so unspeakable should happen to her, while even two minutes ago there was nothing in life so impossible as that she should continue her career of poaching. But her captor was so unaffectedly friendly, his amusement, also, at her horror and the cause of it so sincerely kind, that she was no longer horrified. "Really, Mr. Cochrane, it is too good of you," she said. "But you must first put me at my ease about one thing. You do know--don't you?--how dreadfully sorry I am, and that I hadn't the very slightest idea that Thurso had let the fishing. Oh, by the way, I really _am_ Lady Maud Raynham." "Why, yes," he said, and paused. "Then it's all settled." The whole situation had gone, vanished, before his perfect simplicity and kindliness, and she smiled back at him. "Thank you very much," she said. "I shall love to have this day on the river." "And Duncan?" he said. "Pray keep him if you wish; otherwise I shall send him home. His wife is ill of this--this typhoid." "Oh no; please let him go home, then," said Maud. Then Cochrane turned to the gillie. "Get along home with you, Duncan," he said, "and be sure--tell yourself--that you will find the wife still improving. I think you'll find she's been getting better all morning. But if you give her any of that medicine you will be just helping her--helping her, mind--to get worse again. You understand? If you find when you get home she is worse, give it her by all means. But you won't find that: you will find she is better. Yes, gaff, landing-net, lunch--I've got them all, thanks. So off with you, and let your heart go singing. God's looking after her this morning, as He always did. She's going to get quite well. Don't lose sight of that, and don't let her lose sight of it either." He had apparently quite forgotten about Maud as he spoke, and had turned a side face to her as he talked to the gillie. And though, during this little speech, all the kindliness and merriment that had twinkled in his eyes and twitched in his mouth when "the situation" had been unfolded between Maud and himself was still there, yet there shone through it now some vital and intense seriousness. He had laid his hand on the rough homespun of Duncan's shoulder, and spoke with a quiet and convinced air of authority. Then he nodded dismissal to him, and turned to Maud again, while Duncan trudged off down the riverbank. "I'm so sorry for you and Lord Thurso," he said, "and I think it's downright good of you to have come up here, right in the middle of the season, just because your folk were ill. It's real kind of you." Then suddenly his eye fell on the silver-mailed fish that still lay on the bank.