This appeal, unprincipled as it was, subdued her instantly. "Oh, forgive me!" she said, putting out her hand with the prettiest penitence. "I might have known you better than that. I didn't mean it. Please say you forgive me, and--and call me Maud again!" Relief at being supplied with a missing clue made Peter reckless; indeed, it is to be feared that demoralisation had already set in; he took the hand she gave him, and it did not occur to him to let it go immediately. "Maud, then," he said obediently; "I forgive you, Maud." It was a prettier name to pronounce than Sophia. "How curious it is," she was saying, dreamily, as she nestled comfortably in her chair beside him, "that, up to the very moment when you rushed forward that day, I scarcely gave your existence a thought! And now--how little we ever know what is going to happen to us, do we?" ["Or what _has_ happened, for that matter!" he thought.] This time he would not commit himself to details until he could learn more about the precise nature of his dauntless act, which he at once proceeded to do. "I should very much like to know," he suggested, "what your sensations were at that critical moment." "My sensations? I hardly know," she said. "I remember leaning over the--bulwarks, is it?" (Peter said it _was_ bulwarks)--"the bulwarks, watching a sailor in a little balcony below, who was doing something with a long line----" "Heaving the lead," said Peter; "so he was--go on!" He was intensely excited; it was all plain enough: she had lost her balance and fallen overboard; he had plunged in, and gallantly kept her above water till help arrived. He had always known he was capable of this sort of thing; now he had proved it! "--When all at once," she continued, "I felt myself roughly dragged back by somebody--that was you! I was rather angry for the moment, for it _did_ seem quite a liberty for a total stranger to take,--when, that very instant, I saw the line with a great heavy lump of lead at the end of it whirled round exactly where my head had been, and then I knew that I owed my life to your presence of mind!" Peter was more than disappointed--he was positively disgusted at this exceedingly tame conclusion; it _did_ seem hard that, even under conditions when any act of daring might have been possible to him, he could do nothing more brilliant than this. It was really worse than the monkey business! "I'm afraid you make too much of the very little I did," he said. "Do I? Perhaps that is because if you had not done it, we should never have come to know one another as we do!" (So far, it was a very one-sided sort of knowledge, Peter thought.) "And yet," she added, with a long-drawn sigh, "I sometimes think that we should both be happier if we never _had_ known one another; if you had stood aside, and the lead had struck me, and I had died!" "No, no!" said Peter, unfeignedly alarmed at this morbid reflection, "you mustn't take such a gloomy view of it as all that, you know!"