And the speaker laughed—­a laugh full of amused tolerance, as though her confession had left her a careless spectator of its results.  Mr. Fogo shuddered.

“In heaven’s name, Geraldine, don’t mock me!”

“But it is true.  How should I know?  You have talked to me, read me your verses—­and, indeed, I think them very beautiful.  You have with comparative propriety, because in verse, invited me to fly with thee to a desolate isle in the Southern Sea—­wherever that is—­and forgetting my shame and likewise blame, while you do the same with name and fame and its laurel-leaf, go to moral grief on a coral reef—­”

“Geraldine, you are torturing me.”

“Do I not quote correctly?  My point is this:—­A woman will listen to talk, but she admires action.  Prove that you are ready, not to fly to a coral reef, but to do me one small service, and you may have another answer.”

“Name it.”

Mr. Fogo, peering through the bushes as one fascinated, saw an extremely beautiful woman confronting an extremely pale youth, and fancied also that he saw a curious flash of contempt pass over the woman’s features as she answered—­

“Really unless you kill the Admiral next time he makes a pun, I do not know that just now I need such a service.  By to-morrow, though, or the next day, I may think of one.  Until then”—­she held out her hand—­“wait patiently, and be kind to Sophia.”

Mr. Moggridge started as though stung by a snake; but, recollecting himself, imprinted a kiss upon the proffered fingers.  Again Mrs. Goodwyn-Sandys laughed with unaffected mirth, and again the hidden witness saw that curious gleam of scorn—­only now, as the young man bent his head, it was not dissembled.

They were gone.  Mr. Fogo sank back against the bushes, drew a long breath, and passed his hand nervously over his eyes; but though the scene had passed as a dream, the laugh still rang in his ears.

“It is a judgment on me!” muttered the poor man—­“a judgment!  They are all alike.”

Curiously enough, his next reflection appeared to contradict this view of the sex.

“An extraordinary woman!  But every fresh person I meet in this place is more eccentric than the last.  Let me see,” he continued, checking off the list on his fingers; “there’s Caleb, and that astounding Admiral, and the Twins, and Tamsin—­”

Mr. Fogo stared very hard at the water for some seconds.

“And Tamsin,” he repeated slowly.  “Hullo! my feet seem to be in the water—­and, bless my soul! what has become of the boat?”

He might well ask.  The tide had been steadily rising as he crouched under the banks, and was now lapping his boots.  Worse than this, it had floated off the boat, which he had carelessly forgotten to secure, and drifted it up the river, at first under cover of the trees, afterwards more ostentatiously into mid-channel.

Mr. Fogo rushed up the patch of shingle until brought to a standstill by its sudden declension into deep water.  There was no help for it.  Not a soul was in sight.  He divested himself rapidly of his clothes, piled them in a neat little heap beyond reach of the tide, and then with considerable spirit plunged into the flood and struck out in pursuit of the truant.