For the first time she humbled herself to beg a boon.

“Oh, you please go first, so I won’t have to look down at the water!”

“No; I’m coming behind—­then I can catch you if you get dizzy and go to fall,” he said stubbornly.

“Will you walk right up close, so I can know you are there?”

Thomas Jefferson’s smile was cruelly misleading, as were his words.  “All you’ll have to do will be to reach your hand back and grab me,” he assured her; and thereupon she began to inch her way out over the swirling pool.

When he saw that she could by no possibility turn to look back, Thomas Jefferson deliberately sat down on the bank to watch her.  There had never been anything in his life so tigerishly delightful as this game of playing on the feelings and fears of the girl whose coming had spoiled the solitudes.

For the first few feet Ardea went steadily forward, keeping her eyes fixed on the Great Dane sitting motionless at the farther end of the bridge of peril.  Then, suddenly the dog grew impatient and began to leap and bark like a foolish puppy.  It was too much for Ardea to have her eye-anchor thus transformed into a dizzying whirlwind of gray monsters.  She reached backward for the reassuring hand:  it was not there, and the next instant the hungry pool rose up to engulf her.

In all his years Thomas Jefferson had never had such a stab as that which an instantly awakened conscience gave him when she slipped and fell.  Now he was her murderer, beyond any hope of future mercies.  For a moment the horror of it held him vise-like.  Then the sight of the Great Dane plunging to the rescue freed him.

“Good dog!” he screamed, diving headlong from his own side of the pool; and between them Ardea was dragged ashore, a limp little heap of saturation, conscious, but with her teeth chattering and great, dark circles around the big blue eyes.

Thomas Jefferson’s first word was masculinely selfish.

“I’m awful sorry!” he stammered.  “If you can’t make out to forgive me, I’m going to have a miser’ble time of it after I get home.  God will whip me worse for this than He did for the other.”

It was here, again, that she gave him the feeling that she was older than he.

“It will serve you quite right.  Now you’d better get me home as quick as ever you can.  I expect I’ll be sick again, after this.”

He held his peace and walked her as fast as he could across the fields and out on the pike.  But at the Dabney gates he paused.  It was not in human courage to face the Major under existing conditions.

“I reckon you’ll go and tell your gran’paw on me,” he said hopelessly.

She turned on him with anger ablaze.

“Why should I not tell him?  And I never want to see you or hear of you again, you cruel, hateful boy!”

Thomas Jefferson hung about the gate while she went stumbling up the driveway, leaning heavily on the great dog.  When she had safely reached the house he went slowly homeward, wading in trouble even as he waded in the white dust of the pike.  For when one drinks too deeply of the cup of tyranny the lees are apt to be like the little book the Revelator ate—­sweet as honey in the mouth and bitter in the belly.