“Why don’t you help me out, Mr Walton?  You said you could swim.”

“No, I did not,” I answered coolly.  “You talked so fast, you did not give me time to say so.”

“It’s very cold,” she returned.

“Come out, Judy dear,” said her aunt.  “Run home and change your clothes.  There’s a dear.”

Judy swam to the opposite side, scrambled out, and was off like a spaniel through the trees and up the stairs, dripping and raining as she went.

“You must be very much astonished at the little creature, Mr Walton.”

“I find her very interesting.  Quite a study.”

“There never was a child so spoiled, and never a child on whom it took less effect to hurt her.  I suppose such things do happen sometimes.  She is really a good girl; though mamma, who has done all the spoiling, will not allow me to say she is good.”

Here followed a pause, for, Judy disposed of, what should I say next?  And the moment her mind turned from Judy, I saw a certain stillness—­not a cloud, but the shadow of a cloud—­come over Miss Oldcastle’s face, as if she, too, found herself uncomfortable, and did not know what to say next.  I tried to get a glance at the book in her hand, for I should know something about her at once if I could only see what she was reading.  She never came to church, and I wanted to arrive at some notion of the source of her spiritual life; for that she had such, a single glance at her face was enough to convince me.  This, I mean, made me even anxious to see what the book was.  But I could only discover that it was an old book in very shabby binding, not in the least like the books that young ladies generally have in their hands.

And now my readers will possibly be thinking it odd that I have never yet said a word about what either Judy or Miss Oldcastle was like.  If there is one thing I feel more inadequate to than another, in taking upon me to relate—­it is to describe a lady.  But I will try the girl first.

Judy was rosy, gray-eyed, auburn-haired, sweet-mouthed.  She had confidence in her chin, assertion in her nose, defiance in her eyebrows, honesty and friendliness over all her face.  No one, evidently, could have a warmer friend; and to an enemy she would be dangerous no longer than a fit of passion might last.  There was nothing acrid in her; and the reason, I presume, was, that she had never yet hurt her conscience.  That is a very different thing from saying she had never done wrong, you know.  She was not tall, even for her age, and just a little too plump for the immediate suggestion of grace.  Yet every motion of the child would have been graceful, except for the fact that impulse was always predominant, giving a certain jerkiness, like the hopping of a bird, instead of the gliding of one motion into another, such as you might see in the same bird on the wing.

There is one of the ladies.

But the other—­how shall I attempt to describe her?