"Oh, I don't know. If it does, I'm ready for it! Shall I punt you across?"

"If you please. I don't know that there's anything pleasanter, on such a day, than being ferried across by such a girl."

It was such a marvellously responsive craft that the least movement on Norah's part-a mere smile of hers down at the waterand the punt was out in the stream, moving diagonally across it. The exertion was of so slight a nature to Norah that she spoke as unconstrainedly in mid-stream as though she had been sitting in a drawingroom with an egg-shell tea-cup in her hands in lieu of the long pole that bent in her grasp notwithstanding the apparent ease of her

movements.

"It's strange to me," she said, "sometimes, to think I've got to make just the same allowance as father had for the current; that there's just the same strength in the current now that there used to be fifteen years ago, when I began to learn to balance myself in the punt, a little mite of three: I've changed so very much and it hasn't changed at all!"

"And won't, my dear, I expect, for the next five hundred years." "Unless, you know, they come to make that bridge they're always talking of, and so do away with me altogether. I don't seem to belong to the present age at all, do I? I'm such an old-world institution, you see: I feel as if I belonged to the gallant days when "knights were bold," and there were barons holding sway, and all that sort of thing. When there was chiv-what's the word, Mrs. Marcus?" "Chivalry, my dear?"

'Yes; but I wasn't quite clear about it."

"But you know a very great deal. I think you wonderfully well educated."

"All that curate who 's gone away," Norah said, with a grave face. "All his doings, when father was smoking his pipe in the evenings. Night work."

They were nearing the opposite bank now, and Mrs. Marcus looked very closely at the handsome gipsy face, and wondered whether the rumour were true that poor Mr. Chex, curate, of no expectations, had been wildly in love with his pupil and would have married her if she'd given him the least encouragement, which she wouldn't.

In the final survey of that face as the end of the punt bumped on the bank, Mrs. Marcus felt she wouldn't have been greatly surprised if that rumour had been a true one.

"Well, my dear," she said, handed cut by Norah with the greatest.

G

care, "I don't know what to wish you in parting, I'm sure. I don't like to see you where you are; and yet I don't like the thought of your being anywhere else, because your place in life may be here, you see. But I'm very glad to have heard the story of the rescue from your own lips; and I don't in the least grudge the mile-and-a-half out of my way to come and hear you tell it. Good-bye."

She freely and cordially held out her hand at parting, did good old Mrs. Marcus. Norah shook it with her own large but shapely hand, and then got back into the punt again, while the old lady puffed away up the two or three steep feet of loose gravel path that led to the footway through the wood. Arrived at the top of those two or three steep feet of path, however, Mrs. Marcus turned back and called out :

"Perhaps, my dear, the age of chivalry isn't entirely over yet. Perhaps, if you keep on looking as steadily into the stream as you were doing when I came upon you half an hour ago, one day you'll see the reflection of a knight there. Who knows?"

"Ah!" laughed Norah back, "who knows?"

Then the old lady went her way, and Norah, remaining with her punt where she was, seemed to have laid the advice very much to heart, for she sat in the far end of her craft and stared into the water with all her might.

She might have so stared and waited for a period of half an hour; then there came the distant sound of heavy-booted footsteps breaking coarsely on her reverie, and, raising her head, she looked up, not in the direction of the footsteps, but across the stream to her little black-tarred, two-roomed, wooden abode.

The sun had got low down in the sky, and had opened a banking. account with both windows of the cabin, and paid in nothing but gold upon those two gleaming counters. There were woods both sides the river, and amongst those towards which Norah was glancing a silver moon had put in a chaste and modest appearance to bid the sun good-night; or, perhaps, seeing the sun so overburdened by gold -he had turned the whole up-stream to that precious metal, in a molten state by that time-to see if he would care for a little change in silver.

As Norah looked appreciatively at all this natural glory, a sharp whistle arrowed through the silence, and made her start. It was discharged by the owner of the heavy-booted steps, and that worthy stood on the bank whence Mrs. Marcus had previously departed, and looked down at Norah. He was a particularly agriculturallooking young man, with a good-natured face of the beefy order; and

its appearance was not enhanced in grandeur by a very sickly, not to say sheepish, expression which came upon it when it caught sight of the dark eyes of Norah looking up at its own placidly bovine ones. "Oh!" she said calmly, "so you've come. I thought you wouldn't be long, so I waited to save myself the trouble of coming across for you, you know," she added by way of explanation. "Get in, Noakes, please."

Noakes the only name he ever bore, and supposed to be Christian, and not sur-though nobody, including himself, knew for certain-went down the bank, deposited his basket of rush-plait, which heid his dinner at an earlier period of the day, upon the end seat of the punt, and embarked.

"Shell oi shove 'er across?" he inquired, looking straight up at the distant moon; but presumably referring to the punt, with which the operation would be more useful and efficacious.

Norah also appeared to understand the query as having a more direct bearing on the punt, for she resigned the pole into the vast hands of Noakes, and answered,

"If you like you can. I'll sit down."

Then Noakes, making a good deal of noise with his hob-nailed boots on the lower deck as he stepped to and fro, began to "shove 'er across."

For the first three or four digs of the pole in the ribs of the river Noakes shoved 'er across in silence; then he turned his head a little to get a look at somebody's face, and shoved 'er across to the words, spoken in a tone of the sincerest conviction,

"You du ternight; that you du!

"Do what, Noakes?"

"Look uncommon-uncommon sweet; that you du."

Then Mr. Noakes shoved 'er across in such remarkable fashion, that the pole appeared wrestling with him to see which should be wholly submerged first.

"Don't be stupid; and mind what you're doing. You'll have the punt over if you go on like that."

"Noa," returned Mr. Noakes, more sheepishly sickly than ever; "oi'll shove 'er across all right." Which he proceeded to do in silence. When he got out he paused a moment, and looked back across Norah to the opposite plantation.

"Oi s'pose it ain't a bit o' use o' my speakin' of the thing again?" he inquired very despondently, addressing the opposite plantation, and feeling how many days' growth of beard he had on his chin with. a large rough hand.

"Not a bit, Noakes," said Norah from the end seat of the punt. 'Pray, don't!"

"It's 'ard," remarked Mr. Noakes, still trying to draw the wood on the other side of the stream 'into conversation, "ter see yer, day arter day, an' not ter speak. Mornin' an' night, night an' mornin', you taks me athirt an' across, athirt an' across, and it seems it never ain't no use me speakin'."

"And I don't think it ever will be."

"I wouldn't give oop my eighteen shillin' a week, you understan -not oi; but oi'd go to it ev'ry day, an' leave 'ee to the ferry 'ere. Don't it seem a pity, now, as it ain't no use me speakin'?"

Mr. Noakes was quite pathetic in this appeal to the opposite plantation.

"But," laughed Norah mischievously, "there's Elms, headgardener to Mrs. Jessel at the Hall, and he has thirty-five shillings a week and a cottage too, and I've told him it's no use speaking. I tell them all the same-every one."

"An' they're all jest mad about 'ee," Mr. Noakes told the opposite plantation, with emotion. "Jest mad. Aint it 'ard? Doan't 'ee think now, as it's a bit 'ard?"

Getting no immediate reply from the opposite plantation, Mr. Noakes looked for an instant in Norah's face, and then looked away again hurriedly, with his hand to his eyes.

"It reg'lar dazzles me," he explained.

"Then don't look at it, but go home," Norah laughed.

Mr. Noakes seemed prepared to take this hint, but paused irresolutely for a moment, standing first on one foot and then on the other, and appearing anxious to deliver himself of some great senti

ment.

"Yer face," he said heavily, at last, "yer face is sich a face ter me, that when I sees the sun I thinks o' yer face direc'ly: an' when I sees the moon, I thinks o' yer face direc'ly, I du. Yer face seems reg'lar like sun, moon, an' stars all rolled into one; fur when I sees the stars I thinks o' yer face, that I du. It's a queer thing, so I

thought I'd better tell yer."

Thus can love fertilise the rock, and make flowers spring and blossom in the dust!

"I did'nt know I was so brilliant," Norah laughed. "Goodnight, Noakes."

Then did Mr. Noakes, with another momentary glance, and a sudden, dazzled turning away, address a hoarse “Good night" to the opposite plantation, shoulder his empty basket and depart.

"Funny," said Norah to herself, and thinking of Mrs. Marcus, "that she should have said 'look steadily in the stream and one day you'll see the reflection of a knight there'; because, when I sit here and wait for fares, I always do look in the stream: and the footpath happens to be at such an angle that I always do see my fares in the water before I see them in the flesh. Generally, they're such awful faces they might easily frighten anyone. Well, here I sit, then, waiting for the knight! I wonder how long I shall have to wait? 1 do believe I'm ready for him. Nobody knows as I know, every day and all day long, how lonely I feel. I'm sure I've a warm corner for the knight, in my heart; and that I could make him very cosy there!"

It is sad to think how many equally brave, tender, and true women's hearts there are in the world this moment with the empty corner for the knight in them, and with the power to make him cosy there if he would only come, as he ought to do, loyal and true!

Norah began to sing gently to herself, and to watch the lights appearing in the cottage windows of her nearest neighbours, two hundred yards away; and then, when the summer night was fully fallen, she went indoors to supper.

Strange girl, strange life! Strange, oh, doubly strange and mysterious river, eternally coiling in eddies to the sea: so like the stream of our existence upon which we, stray atoms detached from time, are outward borne !

II.

THE summer glided by upon perfumed wings. The river became crowded by various craft, and seemed an aquatic Bond Street. Norah, taking across such fares as required that attention, would have all eyes turned to her, and various comments would be audibly passed upon her by holiday-making youths from distant shops, and by youths from the great college three miles away up stream. complimentary comments, and well-meant; but insufferably unpleasant to the girl, who began to find the possessing of that intangible attribute, a "reputation," is not unalloyed bliss.

At last the summer began to shiver itself away in fitful winds and showers. The fresh greens began to be streaked with yellow.

But to Norah, sitting daily in her punt and looking at the stream, no true knight came.

At last, on one of those early autumn days when summer seems to have come back to look for something it has left behind, Norah, in the old picturesque costume, with the wide-brimmed hat upon her