Mammon and Co by E.F. Benson — Read

Mrs. Murchison was sitting on a pile of cushions beneath her crimson parasol. The cushions were in a punt, and the punt was on the Thames, and it was Sunday afternoon, and she and her daughter were spending a Saturday till Monday, the last of the season, with the Conybeares. Toby, in flannels, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, was resting from his labours with the punt pole, and sitting opposite this lady. It was a blazing hot day, but, in spite of the glare of the water, cooler, so Mrs. Murchison has asserted, on the river than elsewhere. In point of fact, she felt positively frizzled with the heat; but she had weaned Toby from his basket-chair under a tree on the lawn to have a private talk with him, ascertain how the land lay, and generally encourage him. This desire to speak to him privately took its birth from two words she had had with Kit the evening before.

These two words, again, were the result of a conversation which Toby had had with Kit in the train coming down, and thus the fact that Toby was doomed to punt and swelter under a broiling sun instead of sitting coolly in the shade was indirectly his fault for having said what he had said to Kit.