Yet there was something so innocently frank and undisturbed in her observation, that he knew as instinctively that she suspected nothing, and took him for a half-submerged statue.  He breathed more freely.  But presently she stopped, glanced around her, and, keeping her eyes fixed in his direction, began to walk backwards slowly until she reached a stone balustrade behind her.  On this she leaped, and, sitting down, opened in her lap the sketch-book she was carrying, and, taking out a pencil, to his horror began to sketch!

For a wild moment he recurred to his first idea of diving and swimming at all hazards to the bank, but the conviction that now his slightest movement must be detected held him motionless.  He must save her the mortification of knowing she was sketching a living man, if he died for it.  She sketched rapidly but fixedly and absorbedly, evidently forgetting all else in her work.  From time to time she held out her sketch before her to compare it with her subject.  Yet the seconds seemed minutes and the minutes hours.  Suddenly, to his great relief, a distant voice was heard calling “Lottie.”  It was a woman’s voice; by its accent it also seemed to him an American one.

The young girl made a slight movement of impatience, but did not look up, and her pencil moved still more rapidly.  Again the voice called, this time nearer.  The young girl’s pencil fairly flew over the paper, as, still without looking up, she lifted a pretty voice and answered back, “Y-e-e-s!”

It struck him that her accent was also that of a compatriot.

“Where on earth are you?” continued the first voice, which now appeared to come from the other side of the willows on the path by which the young girl had approached.  “Here, aunty,” replied the girl, closing her sketch-book with a snap and starting to her feet.

A stout woman, fashionably dressed, made her appearance from the willow path.

“What have you been doing all this while?” she said querulously.  “Not sketching, I hope,” she added, with a suspicious glance at the book.  “You know your professor expressly forbade you to do so in your holidays.”

The young girl shrugged her shoulders.  “I’ve been looking at the fountains,” she replied evasively.

“And horrid looking pagan things they are, too,” said the elder woman, turning from them disgustedly, without vouchsafing a second glance.  “Come.  If we expect to do the abbey, we must hurry up, or we won’t catch the train.  Your uncle is waiting for us at the top of the garden.”

And, to Potter’s intense relief, she grasped the young girl’s arm and hurried her away, their figures the next moment vanishing in the tangled shrubbery.

Potter lost no time in plunging with his cramped limbs into the water and regaining the other side.  Here he quickly half dried himself with some sun-warmed leaves and baked mosses, hurried on his clothes, and hastened off in the opposite direction to the path taken by them, yet with such circuitous skill and speed that he reached the great gateway without encountering anybody.  A brisk walk brought him to the station in time to catch a stopping train, and in half an hour he was speeding miles away from Domesday Park and his half-forgotten episode.