“Wouldn’t you like to know!” Audrey retorted.

The embarkation, under Audrey’s direction, was accomplished in safety, and, save for one tiny French scream, in silence.  The silence, which persisted, was peculiar.  Each pair should have had something to tell the other, yet nothing was told, or even asked.  Mr. Gilman rowed with careful science, and brought the dinghy alongside the yacht in an unexceptionable manner.  Musa stood on deck apart, acting indifference.  Madame Piriac, having climbed into the Ariadne, went below at once.  Miss Thompkins, seeing her friend Mr. Price half-way down the saloon companion, moved to speak to him, and they vanished together.  Mr. Gilman was respectfully informed by the engineer that the skipper and Dr. Cromarty were ashore.

“How nice it is on the water!” said Audrey to Mr. Gilman in a low, gentle voice.  “There is a channel round there with three feet of water in it at low tide.”  She sketched a curve in the air with her finger.  “Of course you know this part,” said Mr. Gilman cautiously and even apprehensively.  His glance seemed to be saying:  “And it was you who gave that fearful whistle, too!  Are you, can you be, all that I dreamed?”

“I do,” Audrey answered.  “Would you like me to show it you.”

“I should be more than delighted,” said Mr. Gilman.

With a gesture he summoned a man to untie the dinghy again and hold it, and the man slid down into the dinghy like a monkey.

“I’ll pull,” said Audrey, in the boat.

The man sprang out of the dinghy.

“One instant!” Mr. Gilman begged her, standing up in the sternsheets, and popping his head through a porthole of the saloon.  “Mr. Price!”

“Sir?” From the interior.

“Will you be good enough to play that air with thirty-six variations, of Beethoven’s?  We shall hear splendidly from the dinghy.”

“Certainly, sir.”

And Audrey said to herself:  “You don’t want him to flirt with Tommy while you’re away, so you’ve given him something to keep him busy.”

Mr. Gilman remarked under his breath to Audrey:  “I think there is nothing finer than to hear Beethoven on the water.”

“Oh!  There isn’t!” she eagerly concurred.

Ignoring the thirty-six variations of Beethoven, Audrey rowed slowly away, and after about a hundred yards the boat had rounded a little knoll which marked the beginning of a narrow channel known as the Lander Creek.  The thirty-six variations, however, would not be denied; they softly impregnated the whole beautiful watery scene.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Gilman suddenly, “perhaps your ladyship was not quite pleased at me rowing-about with Miss Thompkins—­especially after I had taken her for a walk.”  He smiled, but his voice was rather wistful.  Audrey liked him prodigiously in that moment.

“Foolish man!” she replied, with a smile far surpassing his, and she rested on her oars, taking care to keep the boat in the middle of the channel.  “Do you know why I asked you to come out?  I wanted to talk to you quite privately.  It is easier here.”