With reluctance the trio gave up the hopeless search for a camp site and started for home upon a long diagonal across the lake. It was just then, as if a signal had been given, that the whole surface of the lake became ruffled as when a piece of blue velvet is rubbed the wrong way, and a strong wind began to blow in Maud's face and upon the backs of the rowers.

Several hours of steady rowing had had its effect upon unaccustomed hands. It was now necessary to pull strongly, and blisters grew swiftly from small beginnings and burst in the palms of the Carolinians. Maud came to their rescue with her steering paddle, but the wind, bent upon having sport with them, sounded a higher note, and the guide boat no longer seemed quick to the least propulsion and light on the water, but as if blunt forward, high to the winds, and half full of stones. She did not run between strokes but came to dead stops, and sometimes, during strong gusts, actually appeared to lose ground.

The surface of the lake didn't as yet testify truly to the full strength of the wind. But soon the little waves grew taller, the intervals between them wider, and their crests began to be blown from them in white spray. The heavens darkened more and more, and to the northeast the sky-line was gradually blotted out as if by soft gray smoke.

"We're going to have rain," said Maud, "and we're going to have fog. So we'd better hurry a little."

"Hurry?" thought the Carolinians sadly. And they redoubled their efforts, with the result that they began to catch crabs.

"Some one ought to see us and send a launch," said Maud.

At that moment, as the wind flattens a field of wheat to the ground, the waves bent and lay down before a veritable blast of black rain. It would have taken more than human strength to hold the guide boat to her course. Maud paddled desperately for a quarter of a minute and gave up. The boat swung sharply on her keel, rocked dangerously, and, once more light and sentient, a creature of life, made off bounding before the gale.

"We are very sorry," said the Carolinians, "but the skin is all off our hands, and at the best we are indifferent boatmen."

"The point is this," said Maud: "Can you swim?"

"I can," said Colonel Meredith, "but I am extremely sorry to confess that my cousin's aquatic education has been neglected. Where he lives every pool contains crocodiles, leeches, snapping-turtles, and water-moccasins, and the incentive to bathing for pleasure is slight."

"Don't worry about me," said Mr. Jonstone. "I can cling to the boat until the millennium."

"We shan't upset—probably," said Maud. "It will be better if you two sit in the bottom of the boat. I'll try to steer and hold her steady. This isn't the first time I've been blown off shore and then on shore. I suppose I ought to apologize for the weather, but it really isn't my fault. Who would have thought this morning that we were in for a storm?"