"See to what you have brought me!" she said. "I'm utterly unable to live without you. And now what are you going to do with me?"
Her eyes were very tender. He caught her hand and kissed it, and laid it against his face.
"There is a way," he repeated. "That thread of a brook leads to it."
He pointed off to the westward, where through the forest a stream, scarcely wider than the canoe, flowed deep and silent between its mounds of moss.
He picked up the paddle and touched the blade to the water; the canoe swung westward.
But the canoe was already in the narrow stream, and he was laughing recklessly, setting-pole poised to swing round the short turns.
"If we turned back now," she said, "it would be sunset before we reached the club."
Without warning, a yellow glory broke through the trees, and the canoe shot out into a vast, flat country, drenched with the rays of the sinking sun.
Blue woods belted the distance; all in front of them was deep, moist meadow-land, carpeted with thickets of wild iris, through which the stream wound in pools of gold.
The beauty of it held her speechless; the spell was upon him, too, and he sat motionless, the water dripping from his steel-tipped setting-pole in drops of fire.
There was a figure moving in the distant meadow; the sun glimmered on something that might have been a long reed quivering.
"An old friend fishing yonder," he said, quietly; "I knew he would be there." He touched her and pointed to the distant figure. "That is the parson of Foxville," he said. "We will need him before we go to London."
She looked across the purple fields of iris. Suddenly his meaning flashed out like a sunbeam.
"Do--do you wish--that--_now_?" she faltered.
He picked up the paddle; she caught his hand, trembling.
"No, no!"--she whispered, with bent head--"I cannot; don't take me so--so quickly. Truly we must be mad to think of it."
He held the paddle poised; after a while her hand slid from the blade and she looked up into his eyes. The canoe moved on.
"Oh, we are quite mad," she said, unsteadily.
The mellow dip! dip! of the paddle woke the drowsing red-winged blackbirds from the reeds; the gray snipe wheeled out across the marsh in flickering flight.
The aged parson of Foxville, intent on his bobbing cork, looked up in mild surprise to see a canoe, heavily hung with water-lilies, glide into his pool and swing shoreward.