"It's the timidity of sudden happiness," he smiled, making fast the first reef cringle to the boom; "you've given me too much to lose." She touched for an instant the hand which clipped the leech beside her, and the print of her warm fingers came like an oath for sanctity, turning to truth what had had for his own ear but a jesting bitterness: she had given him too much to lose. "Well!" he laughed, when they were going again, as the full draught of the river laid them over, and, ahead, the orange lights of Ballindra gleamed in the cleft purple of the land, "would you like that tuck out of her skirts?" She set her lips, as they shaved the outmost ledges of the southern shore, and came about in the banging wind. "You ought to row," she said, smiling. "Not a doubt of it," he admitted blandly; "you've only to say the word." But she did not. Though the harbour was not full, there were riding lights enough upon the water to make, in that dusk, the threading of their way exciting, even without the tide under them, which hummed and jumped against the quivering anchor-chains. But she was proud of her seamanship, and of her knowledge of the river, and conscious that the man who watched her could appreciate the skill in every turn of her wrist, and the pluck which kept it steady as they grazed the great black shapes of ships, or spun about as a straining cable snapped up at them out of the dark water. Tim Moran, the old boatman who put them ashore, had a melancholy headshake at her rashness. "Bedad, sor, it's not meself that larned her to be so vinturesome!" he explained apologetically to Caragh as he pocketed an unlooked-for piece of silver at the slip. "She's a wilful little thing, I'm afraid," Maurice murmured, slipping his arm in hers, as they went up into the obscurity of the shore, "and rather given to running risks in the dark." She gave him her face for answer; and the kiss he put upon it was her seal of safety in the darkest risk that she had run. III It was that risk, a risk of which she guessed so little, which overshadowed the three days which had been added to Caragh's sojourn at Ballindra, and which settled, black and heavy, on his reflections when she waved him a farewell. Lettice had driven him the bleak ten miles to the dreary little station which lay like a great gray stone upon the stony fields, and he had resigned himself to eight hours of Irish travel and his thoughts, doubting of which he would be the rather rid. The announcement of a man's affection for a woman is regarded, to-day at least, dynamically. It is supposed to put things in motion; and it is left, very reasonably, for the man to explain what.