“Oh! to the breakwater by all means,” Tom answered with alacrity.

For reaction had set in.  Not only was the young man still slightly flustered, but vexed by the liveliness of his own emotions.  Everything to-day savoured of exaggeration.  The most ordinary incidents distended, inflated themselves in a really unaccountable manner.  So that, frankly, he fought shy of finding himself alone with Damaris again.  She seemed so constantly to betray him into ill-regulated feeling, ill-considered speech and action, which tended to endanger the completeness of his self-esteem.  Therefore, although admitting his attitude to be scantily heroic, he welcomed the prospect of the ferryman’s chaperonage until such time as her father or her discarded lady-in-waiting, the innocent and pink-nosed Bilson, should effect his final deliverance.

“Yes, it is uncommonly hot,” he repeated, while, with both arms extended, he worked to keep the side of the boat from bumping against the range of piles, backing it clear of the jetty into the fairway of the river.  He found exertion pleasant, steadying.

“Neither Miss Verity nor I shall be sorry to be saved the walk along that basting path.  That is,” he added, smiling with disarming good-temper, “if we’re not blocking business and keeping you too long away from the ferry.”

But Jennifer, mightily pleased at his company and having, moreover, certain scandalous little fishes of his own to fry—­or attempt to fry—­waved the objection aside.

The ferry could very well mind itself for a while, he said; and if anyone should come along they must just hold hands with patience till he got back, that was all.  But passengers were few and far between this time of year and of day.  The “season”—­as was the new-fangled fashion to call it—­being now over; trippers tripped home again to wheresoever their natural habitat might be.  The activities of boys’ schools, picnic parties, ambulant scientific societies and field-clubs—­out in pursuit of weeds, of stone-cracking, and the desecration of those old heathen burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being.  Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox.

Not that he, Jennifer, as he explained, owned to any quarrel with the alien invasion.  Good for trade they were, that tripper lot, though wonnerful simple, he must say, when they came to talk, blessed with an almighty wide swallow for any long-eared fairy tale you liked to put on them.  Mortal full of senseless questions, too, fit to make anybody laugh!—­Whereat overcome by joyous memories of human folly, he opened the red cavern of his apparently toothless mouth, barking up audible mirth, brief and husky, from the depth of a beer-slaked throat.