I had not yet been down to look at the river!  What time could be better than the present one for such a purpose?  I had heard some of the elder girls at Park Hill talk of the delights of boating by moonlight.  Boating in the present case was out of the question, but there was the river itself to be seen.  Taking my hat and scarf, I let myself out by a side door, and then sped away across the park like a hunted fawn, not forgetting to take an occasional bite at her ladyship’s pear.  To-night, for a wonder, my mind seemed purged of all those strange fears and stranger fancies engendered in it, some people would say, by superstition, while others would hold that they were merely the effects of a delicate nervous organisation and over-excitable brain re-acting one upon the other.  Be that as it may, for this night they had left me, and I skipped on my way as fearlessly as though I were walking at mid-day, and with a glorious sense of freedom working within me, such, only in a more intense degree, as I had often felt on our rare holidays at school.

There was a right of public footpath across one corner of the park.  Tracking this narrow white ribbon through the greensward, I came at length to a stile which admitted me into the high road.  Exactly opposite was a second stile, opening on a second footpath, which I felt sure could lead to nowhere but the river.  Nor was I mistaken.  In another five minutes I was on the banks of the Adair.

To my child’s eye, the scene was one of exquisite beauty.  To-day, I should probably call it flat and wanting in variety.  The equable full-flowing river was lighted up by a full and unclouded moon.  The undergrowth that fringed its banks was silver-foliaged; silver-white rose the mists in the meadows.  Silence everywhere, save for the low liquid murmur of the river itself, which seemed burdened with some love secret, centuries old, which it was vainly striving to tell in articulate words.

The burden of the beauty lay upon me and saddened me.  I wandered slowly along the bank, watching the play of moonlight on the river.  Suddenly I saw a tiny boat that was moored to an overhanging willow, and floated out the length of its chain towards the middle of the stream.  I looked around.  Not a creature of any kind was visible.  Then I thought to myself:  “How pleasant it would be to sit out there in the boat for a little while.  And surely no one could be angry with me for taking such a liberty—­not even the owner of the boat, if he were to find me there.”

No sooner said than done.  I went down to the edge of the river and drew the boat inshore by the chain that held it.  Then I stepped gingerly in, half-frightened at my own temerity, and sat down.  The boat glided slowly out again to the length of its chain and then became motionless.  But it was motionless only for a moment or two.  A splash in the water drew my attention to the chain.  It had been insecurely fastened to a branch of the willow; my weight in the boat had caused it to become detached and fall into the water, and with horrified eyes I saw that I had now no means of getting back to the shore.  Next moment the strength of the current carried the boat out into mid-stream, and I began to float slowly down the river.