“Yes, if you change boots with me,” laughed Jack, determined to divert her mind; “I was nearly swamped getting back here.  That is where most of this mud came from—­” and Jack turned his long, clay-encrusted boot so that Ruth could see how large a section of the “fill” he had brought with him.

Ruth began to laugh.  There was no ostensible reason why she should laugh; there was nothing about Jack’s make-up to cause it.  Indeed, she thought he had never looked so handsome, even if his hair were plastered to his temples under his water-soaked hat and his clothes daubed with mud.

And yet she did laugh:—­At the way her veil got knotted under her chin,—­so tightly knotted that Jack had to take both hands to loosen it, begging pardon for touching her throat, and hoping all the while that his clumsy fingers had not hurt her;—­at the way her hat was crumpled, the flowers “never,—­never, being of the slightest use to anybody again”; at her bedraggled skirts—­“such a sight, and sopping wet.”

And Jack laughed, too,—­agreeing to everything she said, until she reached that stage in the conversation, never omitted on occasions of this kind, when she declared, arching her head, that she must look like a perfect fright, which Jack at once refuted exclaiming that he had never seen her look so—­he was going to say “pretty,” but checked himself and substituted “well,” instead, adding, as he wiped off her ridiculously small boots, despite her protests, with his wet handkerchief,—­that cloud-bursts were not such bad things, after all, now that he was to have the pleasure of escorting her home.

And so the two walked back to the village, the afternoon sun, which had now shattered the lowering clouds, gilding and glorifying their two faces, Jack stopping at Mrs. Hicks’s to change his clothes and Ruth keeping on to the house, where he was to join her an hour later, when the two would have a cup of tea and such other comforts as that young lady might prepare for her water-soaked lover.

CHAPTER XXI

If ten minutes make half an hour, then it took Jack that long to rush upstairs, two steps at a time, burst into his room, strip off his boots, tear off his wet clothes, struggle into others jerked from his wardrobe, tie a loose, red-silk scarf under the rolling collar of his light-blue flannel shirt, slip into a grey pea-jacket and unmentionables, give his hair a brush and a promise, tilt a dry hat on one side of his head and skip down-stairs again.

Old Mrs. Hicks had seen him coming and had tried to catch him as he flew out the door, hoping to get some more definite news of the calamity which had stirred the village, but he was gone before she could reach the front hall.

He had not thought of his better clothes; there might still be work to do, and his Chief might again need his services.  Ruth would understand, he said to himself—­all of which was true.  Indeed, she liked him better in his high-water rubber boots, wide slouch hat and tarpaulins than in the more conventional suit of immaculate black with which he clothed his shapely body whenever he took her to one of the big dinners at one of the great houses on Washington Square.