Lord Newhaven shook his head.

“I must go back to my boys now,” he said, “or they will be getting into mischief.”

Doll nodded.  He and Lord Newhaven had had a hard fight to get the leaking boat to land with Hugh at the bottom of it.  It had filled ominously when Doll ceased baling to help to drag in the heavy, unconscious body.

There had been a moment when, inapprehensive as he was, Doll had remembered, with a qualm, that Lord Newhaven could not swim.

“Every fellow ought to swim,” was the moral he drew from the incident and repeated to his wife, who, struck by the soundness of the remark, repeated it to the Gresleys.

Lord Newhaven retraced his steps slowly along the bank in his water-logged boots.  He was tired, and he did not hurry, for he could see in the distance two small figures sitting faithfully on a log where he had left them.

“Good little chaps,” he said, half aloud.

In spite of himself his thoughts went back to Hugh.  His feelings towards him had not changed, but they had been forced during the last half-hour out of their original intrenchments into the open, and were liable to attack from new directions.

It was not that he had virtually saved Hugh’s life, for Doll would never have got him into the leaking boat and kept it afloat single-handed.  That first moment of enthusiasm, when he had rubbed the senseless limbs and breathed into the cold lips, and had felt his heart leap when life came halting back into them, that moment had passed and left him cold.

But Hugh’s melancholy eyes, as they opened once more on this world and met his unflinchingly, haunted him, and the sudden anger at his interference.  It was the intrenchment of his contempt that Lord Newhaven missed.

A meaner nature would not have let him off so easily as Hugh had done.

“It was an accident,” he said to himself, unwillingly.  “He need not have admitted that, but I should have been on a gridiron if he had not.  In different circumstances that man and I might have been friends.  And if he had got into a scrape of this kind a little further afield I might have helped to get him out of it.  He feels it.  He has aged during the last two months.  But as it is—­Upon my word, if he were a boy I should have had to let him off.  It would have been too bloodthirsty.  But he is seven-and-twenty.  He is old enough to know better.  She made a fool of him, of course.  She made a greater one of me once, for I—­married her.”

Lord Newhaven reviewed with a dispassionate eye his courtship and marriage.

“A wood anemone,” he said to himself; “I likened her to a wood anemone.  Good Lord!  And I was thirty years of age, while this poor devil is twenty-seven.”

Lord Newhaven stopped short with fixed eyes.

“I believe I should have to let him off,” he said, half-aloud.  “I believe I would let him off if I was not as certain as I stand here that he will never do it.”