ange had taken place in the
arrangement of such an unimportant matter as the rudder of a pleasure-
boat. As the two beautiful young faces bent over the rudder, they seemed
to me to be very close together, and though it only lasted a moment, a
sort of pang shot through me as I looked on. Clara sat in her place and
did not look round, but presently she said, with just the least stiffness
in her tone:

"How shall we divide? Won't you go into Ellen's boat, Dick, since,
without offence to our guest, you are the better sculler?"

Dick stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder, and said: "No, no; let
Guest try what he can do--he ought to be getting into training now.
Besides, we are in no hurry: we are not going far above Oxford; and even
if we are benighted, we shall have the moon, which will give us nothing
worse of a night than a greyer day."

"Besides," said I, "I may manage to do a little more with my sculling
than merely keeping the boat from drifting down stream."

They all laughed at this, as if it had a been very good joke; and I
thought that Ellen's laugh, even amongst the others, was one of the
pleasantest sounds I had ever heard.

To be short, I got into the new-come boat, not a little elated, and
taking the sculls, set to work to show off a little. For--must I say
it?--I felt as if even that happy world were made the happier for my
being so near this strange girl; although I must say that of all the
persons I had seen in that world renewed, she was the most unfamiliar to
me, the most unlike what I could have thought of. Clara, for instance,
beautiful and bright as she was, was not unlike a _very_ pleasant and
unaffected young lady; and the other girls also seemed nothing more than
specimens of very much improved types which I had known in other times.
But this girl was not only beautiful with a beauty quite different from
that of "a young lady," but was in all ways so strangely interesting; so
that I kept wondering what she would say or do next to surprise and
please me. Not, indeed, that there was anything startling in what she
actually said or did; but it was all done in a new way, and always with
that indefinable interest and pleasure of life, which I had noticed more
or less in everybody, but which in her was more marked and more charming
than in anyone else that I had seen.

We were soon under way and going at a fair pace through the beautiful
reaches of the river, between Bensington and Dorchest