lay his hand on the bridle.

For a minute or two there was a chase among the shallow, rippling waves,
but a horse sinking in heavy sand is not hard to catch. Josephine sat
passive, having enough to do, perhaps, merely to keep her seat. When at
length Caius stood on the island grass with the bridle in his hand, she
slipped down without a word and stood beside him.

Caius let the dripping animal go, and he went, plunging with delight
among the flowering weeds and bushes. Caius himself was dripping also,
but, then, he could answer for his own movements that he would not come
too near the lady.

Josephine no longer wore her loose black working dress; this morning she
was clad in an old habit of green cloth. It was faded with weather, and
too long in the skirt for the fashion then in vogue, but Caius did not
know that; he only saw that the lower part of the skirt was wet, and
that, as she stood at her own graceful height upon the grass, the wet
cloth twisted about her feet and lay beside them in a rounded fold, so
that she looked just now more like the pictures of the fabled sea-maids
than she had ever done when she had floated in the water.

The first thing Josephine did was to look up in his face and laugh; it
was her own merry peal of low laughter that reminded him always of a
child laughing, not more for fun than for mere happiness. It bridged for
him all the sad anxieties and weary hours that had passed since he had
heard her laugh before; and, furthermore, he knew, without another
moment's doubt, that Josephine, knowing him as she did, would never have
looked up to him like that unless she loved him. It was not that she was
thinking of love just then--that was not what was in her face; but it
was clear that she was conscious of no shadow of difference between them
such as would have been there if his love had been doomed to
disappointment. She looked to him to join in her laughter with perfect
comradeship.

"Why did the horse come here?" asked Josephine.

Caius explained the motives of the colt as far as he understood them;
and she told how she had persuaded her uncle to let her ride it, and all
that she had thought and felt when it had run away with her down the
chine and into the water. It was not at all what he could have believed
beforehand, that when he met Josephine they would talk with perfect
contentment of the affairs of the passing hour; and yet so it was.

With graver faces they talked of the dying w