laugh too, and spun the ring
he had filched from her high into the moonlight.

How it happened neither of them could ever afterwards say; but just at
that critical moment when the ring was glittering in mid-air, some
wayward current, or it might have been the water-sprite Jerry had just
detected, lapped the water smartly against the punt and bumped it against
the bank. Jerry exclaimed and nearly overbalanced backwards; Nan made a
hasty grab at her falling property, but her hand only collided with his,
making a similar grab at the same moment, and between them they sent the
ring spinning far out into the moonlit ripples.

It disappeared before their dazzled eyes into that magic bar of light,
and the girl and the boy turned and gazed at one another in speechless
consternation.

Nan was the first to recover. She drew a deep breath, and burst into a
merry peal of laughter.

"My dear boy, for pity's sake don't look like that! I never saw anything
so absolutely tragic in my life. Why, what does it matter? I can buy
another. I can buy fifty if I want them."

Thus reassured, Jerry began to laugh too, but not with Nan's abandonment.
The incident had had a sobering effect upon him.

"But I'm awfully sorry," he protested. "All my fault. You must let me
make it good."

This suggestion added to Nan's mirth. "Oh, I couldn't really. I should
feel as if I was married to you, and I shouldn't like that at all. Now
you needn't look cross, for you know you wouldn't either. No, don't be
silly, Jerry. It doesn't matter the least little bit in the world."

"But, I say, won't the absent one be savage?" suggested Jerry.

Nan tossed her head. "I'm sure I don't know. Anyhow it doesn't matter."

"Do you really mean that?" he persisted. "Don't you really care?"

Nan threw herself back in the boat with her face to the stars.

"Why, of course not," she declared, with regal indifference. "How can you
be so absurd?"

And in face of such sublime recklessness, he was obliged to be convinced.

CHAPTER IV

Nan's picnic on the lake was not concluded much before ten o'clock.

She ran home through the moonlight, bareheaded, whistling as carelessly
as a boy. Night and day were the same thing to her in the place in
which she had lived all her life. There was not one of the village folk
whom she did not know, not one for whom the doings of the wild Everards
did not provide food for discussion. For Nan undoubtedly was an Everard
still,