E-text prepared by Lionel Sear

LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING

A Man's Portrait of a Woman

by

ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH ('Q')

First Published in 1910.

This story originally appeared in the weekly edition of the "Times," and is now issued in book form by arrangement with the Proprietors of that Journal.

TO My Commodore and old Friend Edward Atkinson, Esq. of Rosebank, Mixtow-by-Fowey.

NOTE

Some years ago an unknown American friend proposed my writing a story on the loves and adventures of Sir Harry Frankland, Collector of the Port of Boston in the mid-eighteenth century, and Agnes Surriage, daughter of a poor Marble-head fisherman. The theme attracted me as it has attracted other writers—and notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, who built a poem on it. But while their efforts seemed to leave room for another, I was no match for them in knowledge of the facts or of local details; and, moreover, these facts and details cramped my story. I repented, therefore and, taking the theme, altered the locality and the characters—who, by the way, in the writing have become real enough to me, albeit in a different sense. Thus (I hope) no violence has been offered to historical truth, while I have been able to tell the tale in my own fashion.

"Q."

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.—PORT NASSAU.

I. THE BEACH.

II. PORT NASSAU.

III. TWO GUINEAS.

IV. FATHER AND SON.

V. RUTH.

VI. PARENTHETICAL—OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.

VII. A SABBATH-BREAKER.

VIII. ANOTHER SABBATH-BREAKER.

IX. THE SCOURGE.

X. THE BENCH.

XI. THE STOCKS.

XII. THE HUT BY THE BEACH.

XIII. RUTH SETS OUT.

BOOK II.—PROBATION.

I. AFTER TWO YEARS.

II. MR. SILK.

III. MR. HICHENS.

IV. VASHTI.

V. SIR OLIVER'S HEALTH.

VI. CAPTAIN HARRY AND MR. HANMER.

VII. FIRST OFFER.

VIII. CONCERNING MARGARET.

IX. THE PROSPECT.

X. THREE LADIES.

XI. THE ESPIAL.

XII. LADY CAROLINE.

XIII. DIANA VYELL.

XIV. MR. SILK PROPOSES.

XV. THE CHOOSING.

BOOK III.—THE BRIDALS.

I. BETROTHED.

II. THE RETURN.

III. NESTING.

IV. THE BRIDEGROOM.

V. RUTH'S WEDDING DAY.

VI. "YET HE WILL COME—".

VII. HOUSEKEEPING.

VIII. HOME-COMING.

BOOK IV.—LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.

I. BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.

II. SIR OLIVER SAILS.

III. MISCALCULATING WRATH.

IV. THE TERRACE.

V. A PROLOGUE TO NOTHING.

VI. CHILDLESS MOTHER.

BOOK V.—LISBON AND AFTER.

I. ACT OF FAITH.

II. DONNA MARIA.

III. EARTHQUAKE.

IV. THE SEARCH.

V. THE FINDING.

VI. DOCUMENTS.

VII. THE LAST OFFER.

EPILOGUE

"An innocent life, yet far astray." Wordsworth's Ruth.

BOOK I.

PORT NASSAU.

Chapter I.

THE BEACH.

A coach-and-six, as a rule, may be called an impressive Object.
But something depends on where you see it.

Viewed from the tall cliffs—along the base of which, on a strip of beach two hundred feet below, it crawled between the American continent and the Atlantic Ocean—Captain Oliver Vyell's coach-and-six resembled nothing so nearly as a black-beetle.

For that matter the cliffs themselves, swept by the spray and humming with the roar of the beach—even the bald headland towards which they curved as to the visible bourne of all things terrestrial—shrank in comparison with the waste void beyond, where sky and ocean weltered together after the wrestle of a two days' storm; and in comparison with the thought that this rolling sky and heaving water stretched all the way to Europe. Not a sail showed, not a wing anywhere under the leaden clouds that still dropped their rain in patches, smurring out the horizon. The wind had died down, but the ships kept their harbours and the sea-birds their inland shelters. Alone of animate things, Captain Vyell's coach-and-six crept forth and along the beach, as though tempted by the promise of a wintry gleam to landward.

A god—if we may suppose one of the old careless Olympians seated there on the cliff-top, nursing his knees—must have enjoyed the comedy of it, and laughed to think that this pert beetle, edging its way along the sand amid the eternal forces of nature, was here to take seizin of them—yes, actually to take seizin and exact tribute. So indomitable a fellow is Man, improbus Homo; and among men in his generation Captain Oliver Vyell was Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston, Massachusetts.

In fairness to Captain Vyell be it added that he—a young English blood, bearing kinship with two or three of the great Whig families at home, and sceptical as became a person of quality—was capable as any one of relishing the comedy, had it been pointed out to him. With equal readiness he would have scoffed at Man's pretensions in this world and denied him any place at all in the next. Nevertheless on a planet the folly of which might be taken for granted he claimed at least his share of the reverence paid by fools to rank and wealth. He was travelling this lonely coast on a tour of inspection, to visit and report upon a site where His Majesty's advisers had some design to plant a fort; and a fine ostentation coloured his progress here as through life. He had brought his coach because it conveyed his claret and his batterie de cuisine (the seaside inns were detestable); but being young and extravagantly healthy and, with all his faults, very much of a man, he preferred to ride ahead on his saddle-horse and let his pomp follow him.

Six horses drew the coach, and to each pair of leaders rode a postillion, while a black coachman guided the wheelers from the box-seat; all three men in the Collector's livery of white and scarlet. On a perch behind the vehicle—which, despite its weight, left but the shallowest of wheel-ruts on the hard sand—sat Manasseh, the Collector's cook and body-servant; a huge negro, in livery of the same white and scarlet but with heavy adornments of bullion, a cockade in his hat, and a loaded blunderbuss laid across his thighs. Last and alone within the coach, with a wine-case for footstool, sat a five-year-old boy.

Master Dicky Vyell—the Collector's only child, and motherless—sat and gazed out of the windows in a delicious terror. For hours that morning the travellers had ploughed their way over a plain of blown sand, dotted with shrub-oaks, bay-berries, and clumps of Indian grass; then, at a point where the tall cliffs began, had wound down to the sea between low foothills and a sedge-covered marsh criss-crossed by watercourses that spread out here and there into lagoons. At the head of this descent the Atlantic had come into sight, and all the way down its echoes had grown in the boy's ears, confusing themselves with a delicious odour which came in fact from the fields of sedge, though he attributed it to the ocean.

But the sound had amounted to a loud humming at most; and it was with a leap and a shout, as they rounded the last foothill and saw the vast empty beach running northward before them, league upon league, that the thunder of the surf broke on them. For a while the boom and crash of it fairly stunned the child. He caught at an arm-strap hanging by the window and held on with all his small might, while the world he knew with its familiar protective boundaries fell away, melted, left him—a speck of life ringed about with intolerable roaring emptiness. To a companion, had there been one in the coach, he must have clung in sheer terror; yes, even to his father, to whom he had never clung and could scarcely imagine himself clinging. But his father rode ahead, carelessly erect on his blood-horse—horse and rider seen in a blur through the salt-encrusted glass. Therefore Master Dicky held on as best he might to the arm-strap.

By degrees his terror drained away, though its ebb left him shivering. Child though he was, he could not remember when he had not been curious about the sea. In a dazed fashion he stared out upon the breakers. The wind had died down after the tempest, but the Atlantic kept its agitation. Meeting the shore (which hereabouts ran shallow for five or six hundred yards) it reared itself in ten-foot combers, rank stampeding on rank, until the sixth or seventh hurled itself far up the beach, spent itself in a long receding curve, and drained back to the foaming forces behind. Their untiring onset fascinated Dicky; and now and again he tasted renewal of his terror, as a wave, taller than the rest or better timed, would come sweeping up to the coach itself, spreading and rippling about the wheels and the horses' fetlocks. "Surely this one would engulf them," thought the child, recalling Pharaoh and his chariots; but always the furious charge spent itself in an edge of white froth that faded to delicate salt filigree and so vanished. When this had happened a dozen times or more, and still without disaster, he took heart and began to turn it all into a game, choosing this or that breaker and making imaginary wagers upon it; but yet the spectacle fascinated him, and still at the back of his small brain lay wonder that all this terrifying fury and uproar should always be coming to nothing. God must be out yonder (he thought) and engaged in some mysterious form of play. He had heard a good deal about God from Miss Quiney, his governess; but this playfulness, as an attribute of the Almighty, was new to him and hitherto unsuspected.

The beach, with here and there a break, extended for close upon twenty miles, still curving towards the headland; and the travellers covered more than two-thirds of the distance without espying a single living creature. As the afternoon wore on the weather improved. The sun, soon to drop behind the cliff-summits on the left, asserted itself with a last effort and shot a red gleam through a chink low in the cloud-wrack. The shaft widened. The breakers—indigo-backed till now and turbid with sand in solution—began to arch themselves in glass-green hollows, with rainbows playing on the spray of their crests. And then—as though the savage coast had become, at a touch of sunshine, habitable—our travellers spied a man.

He came forth from a break in the cliffs half a mile ahead and slowly crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began, after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards. His back was turned thus upon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had given no attention, being old and purblind.

The coach rolled so smoothly, and the jingle of harness was so entirely swallowed in the roar of the sea, that Captain Vyell, pushing ahead and overtaking the old fellow, had to ride close up to his shoulder and shout. It appeared then, for further explanation, that his hearing as well as his eyesight was none of the best. He faced about in a puzzled fashion, stared, and touched his hat—or rather lifted his hand a little way and dropped it again.

"Your Honour will be the Collector," he said, and nodded many times, at first as if proud of his sagacity, but afterwards dully—as though his interest had died out and he would have ceased nodding but had forgotten the way. "Yes; my gran'-darter told me. She's in service at the Bowling Green, Port Nassau; but walks over on Lord's Days to cheer up her mother and tell the news. They've been expectin' you at Port Nassau any time this week."

The Collector asked where he lived, and the old man pointed to a gully in the cliff and to something which, wedged in the gully, might at a first glance be taken for a large and loosely-constructed bird's nest. The Collector's keen eyes made it out to be a shanty of timber roofed with shingles and barely overtopping a wood pile.

"Wreckwood, eh?"

"A good amount of it ought to be comin' in, after the gale."

"Then where's your hook?"—for the wreckwood gatherers along this part of the coast carry long gaffs to hook the flotsam and drag it above reach of the waves.

"Left it up the bank," said the old man shortly. After a moment he pulled himself together for an explanation, hollowed his palms around his mouth, and bawled above the boom of the surf. "I'm old. I don't carry weight more'n I need to. When a log comes in, my darter spies it an' tells me. She's mons'rous quick-sighted for wood an' such like— though good for nothin' else." (A pause.) "No, I'm hard on her; she can cook clams."

"You were looking for clams?" Captain Vyell scrutinised the man's face. It was a patriarchal face, strikingly handsome and not much wrinkled; the skin delicately tanned and extraordinarily transparent. Somehow this transparency puzzled him. "Hungry?" he asked quickly; and as quickly added, "Starving for food, that's what you are."

"It's the Lord's will," answered the old man.

The coach had come to a halt a dozen paces away. The child within it could hear nothing of this conversation; but to the end of his life his memory kept vivid the scene and the two figures in it—his father, in close-fitting riding-coat of blue, with body braced, leaning sideways a little against the wind, and a characteristic hint of the cavalryman about the slope of the thigh; the old wreck-picker standing just forward of the bay's shoulder and looking up, with blown hair and patient eyes. Memory recalled even the long slant of the bay's shoulder—a perfectly true detail, for the horse was of pure English race and bred by the Collector himself.

After this, as he remembered, some command must have been given, for Manasseh climbed down, opened the coach door and drew from under the seat a box, of which he raised the lid, disclosing things good to eat— among them a pasty with a crisp brown crust.

The wreck-picker broke off a piece of the pasty and wrapped it in a handkerchief—and memory recalled, as with a small shock of surprise, that the handkerchief was clean. The old man, though ragged enough to scare the crows, was clean from his bare head to his bare sea-bleached feet. He munched the rest of the pasty, talking between mouthfuls. To his discourse Dicky paid no heed, but slipped away for a scamper on the sands.

As he came running back he saw the old man, in the act of wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, suddenly shoot out an arm and point. Just beyond the breakers a solitary bird—an osprey—rose with a fish shining in the grip of its claws. It flew northward, away for the headland, for a hundred yards or so; and then by some mischance let slip his prey, which fell back into the sea. The boy saw the splash. To his surprise the bird made no effort to recover the fish—neither stooped nor paused—but went winging sullenly on its way.

"That's the way o' them," commented the old wreck-picker. "Good food, an' to let it go. I could teach him better."

But the boy, years after, read it as another and different parable.

Chapter II.

PORT NASSAU.

They left the beach, climbed a road across the neck of the promontory, and rattled downhill into Port Nassau. Dusk had fallen before they reached the head of its cobbled street; and here one of the postillions drew out a horn from his holster and began to blow loud blasts on it. This at once drew the townsfolk into the road and warned them to get out of the way.

To the child, drowsed by the strong salt air and the rocking of the coach, the glimmering whitewashed houses on either hand went by like a procession in a dream. The figures and groups of men and women on the side-walks, too, had a ghostly, furtive air. They seemed to the boy to be whispering together and muttering. Now this was absurd; for what with the blare of the postillion's horn, the clatter of hoofs, the jolting and rumbling of wheels, the rattle of glass, our travellers had all the noise to themselves—or all but the voice of the gale now rising again for an afterclap and snoring at the street corners. Yet his instinct was right. Many of the crowd were muttering. These New Englanders had no love to spare for a Collector of Customs, a fine gentlemen from Old England and (rumour said) an atheist to boot. They resented this ostent of entry; the men more sullenly than the women, some of whom in their hearts could not help admiring its high-and-mighty insolence.

The Collector, at any rate, had a crowd to receive him, for it was Saturday evening. On Saturdays by custom the fishing-fleet of Port Nassau made harbour before nightfall, and the crews kept a sort of decorous carnival before the Sabbath, of which they were strict observers. In the lower part of the town, by the quays, much buying and selling went on, in booths of sail-cloth lit as a rule by oil-flares. For close upon a week no boat had been able to put to sea; but the Saturday market and the Saturday gossip and to-and-fro strolling were in full swing none the less, though the salesmen had to substitute hurricane-lamps for their ordinary flares, and the boy—now wide awake again—had a passing glimpse of a couple of booths that had been wrecked by the rising wind and were being rebuilt. He craned out to stare at the helpers, while they, pausing in their work and dragged to and fro by the flapping canvas, stared back as the coach went by.

It came to a halt on a level roadway some few rods beyond this bright traffic, in an open space which, he knew, must be near the waterside, for beyond the lights of the booths he had spied a cluster of masts quite close at hand. Or perhaps he had fallen asleep and in his sleep had been transported far inland. For the wind had suddenly died down, the coach appeared to be standing in a forest glade—at any rate, among trees—and through the trees fell a soft radiance that might well be the moon's were it only a tinge less yellow. In the shine of it stood Manasseh, holding open the coach door; and as the child stepped out these queer impressions were succeeded by one still more curious and startling. For a hand, as it seemed, reached out of the darkness, brushed him smartly across the face, and was gone. He gave a little cry and stood staring aloft at a lantern that hung some feet above him from an arched bracket. Across its glass face ran the legend BOWLING GREEN INN, in orange-coloured lettering, and the ray of its oil-lamp wavered on the boughs of two tall maples set like sentinels by the Inn gateway and reddening now to the fall of the leaf. Yes, the ground about his feet was strewn with leaves: it must be one of these that had brushed by his face.

If the folk in the streets had been sullen, those of the Inn were eager enough, even obsequious. A trio of grooms fell to unharnessing the horses; a couple of porters ran to and fro, unloading the baggage and cooking-pots; while the landlady shouted orders right and left in the porchway. She deemed, honest soul, that she was mistress of the establishment, until Manasseh undeceived her.

Manasseh's huge stature and gold-encrusted livery commanded respect in spite of his colour. He addressed her as "woman." "Woman, if you will stop yo' cacklin' and yo' crowin'? Go in now and fetch me fish, fetch me chickens, fetch me plenty eggs. Fetch me a dam scullion. Heh? Stir yo' legs and fetch me a dam scullion, and the chickens tender. His Exc'llence mos' partic'ler the chickens tender."

Still adjuring her he shouldered his way through the house to the kitchen, whence presently his voice sounded loud, authoritative, above the clatter of cooking-pots. From time to time he broke away from the business of unpacking to reiterate his demands for fish, eggs, chicken—the last to be tender at all costs and at pain of his tremendous displeasure.

"And I assure you, ma'am," said Captain Vyell, standing in the passage at the door of his private room, "his standard is a high one. I believe the blackguard never stole a tough fowl in his life. . . . Show me to my bedroom, please, if the trunks are unstrapped; and the child, here, to his. . . . Eh? What's this?—a rush-light? I don't use rush-lights. Go to Manasseh and ask him to unpack you a pair of candles."

The landlady returned with a silver candlestick in either hand, and candles of real wax. She had never seen the like, and led the way upstairs speculating on their cost. The bedrooms proved to be clean, though bare and more than a little stuffy—their windows having been kept shut for some days against the gale. The Collector commanded them to be opened. The landlady faintly protested. "The wind would gutter the candles—and such wax too!" She was told to obey, and she obeyed.

In the boy's room knelt a girl—a chambermaid—unstrapping his small valise. She had a rush-light on the floor beside her, and did not look up as the landlady thrust open the lattice and left the room with the Collector, the boy remaining behind. His candle stood upon a chest of drawers by the window; and, as the others went out, a draught of wind caught the dimity curtain, blew it against the flame, and in an instant ignited it.

The girl looked up swiftly at the sudden light above her, and as swiftly—before the child could cry out—was on her feet. She caught the fire between her two hands and beat it out, making no noise and scarcely flinching, though her flesh was certainly being scorched.

"That was lucky," she said, looking across at him with a smile.

"Ruth!—Ruth!" called the landlady's voice, up the corridor.
"Here, a moment!"

She dropped the charred curtain and hurried to answer the call.

"Ruth! Where's the bootjack? His Honour will take off his riding-boots."

"Bootjack, ma'am?" interrupted the Collector, leaning back in a chair and extending a shapely leg with instep and ankle whereon the riding-boot fitted like a glove. "I don't maul my leather with bootjacks. Send Manasseh upstairs to me; ask him with my compliments what the devil he means by clattering saucepans when he should be attending to his master. . . . Eh, what's this?"

"She can do it, your Honour," said the landlady, catching Ruth by the shoulder and motioning her to kneel and draw off the boot. (It is likely she shirked carrying the message.)

"Oh, very well—if only she won't twist my foot. . . . Take care of the spur, child."

The girl knelt, and with her blistered hand took hold of the boot-heel below the spur. It cost her exquisite pain, but she did not wince; and her head being bent, no one perceived the tears in her eyes.

She had scarcely drawn off the second boot, when Manasseh appeared in the doorway carrying a silver tray with glasses and biscuits; a glass of red wine for his master, a more innocent cordial for the young gentleman, and both glasses filmed over with the chill of crushed ice.

The girl was withdrawing when the Collector, carelessly feeling in his pocket, drew out a coin and put it into her hand. Her fingers closed on it sharply, almost with a snatch. In truth, the touch of metal was so intolerable to the burnt flesh that, but for clutching it so, she must have dropped the coin. Still with bowed head she passed quietly from the room.

Master Dicky munched his macaroon and sipped his cordial. He had a whole guinea in his breeches pocket, and was thinking it would be great fun to step out and explore the town, if only for a little way. To-morrow was Sunday, and all the stores would be closed. But Manasseh was too busy to come with him for bodyguard—and his father's boots were off; and besides, he stood in great awe and shyness of his admired parent. Had the boots been on, it would have cost him a bold effort to make the request. On the whole, the cordial warming him, Master Dicky had a mind to take French leave.

Chapter III.

TWO GUINEAS.

Though the wind hummed among the chimneys and on the back of the roof, on either side of the lamp over the gateway the maples stood in the lee and waved their boughs gently, shedding a leaf now and then in some deflected gust. Beyond and to the left stretched a dim avenue, also of maples; and at the end of this, as he reached the gate, the boy could spy the lights of the fair.

There was no risk at all of losing his way.

He stepped briskly forth and down the avenue. Where the trees ended, and with them the high wall enclosing the inn's stable-yard, the wind rushed upon him with a whoop, and swept him off the side-walk almost to the middle of the road-way. But by this time the lights were close at hand. He pressed his little hat down on his head and battled his way towards them.

The first booth displayed sweetmeats; the next hung out lines of sailors' smocks, petticoats, sea-boots, oilskin coats and caps, that swayed according to their weight; the third was no booth but a wooden store, wherein a druggist dispensed his wares; the fourth, also of wood, belonged to a barber, and was capable of seating one customer at a time while the others waited their turn on the side-walk. Here—his shanty having no front—the barber kept them in good humour by chatting to all and sundry while he shaved; but a part of the crowd had good-naturedly drifted on to help his neighbour, a tobacco-seller, whose stall had suffered disaster. A painted wooden statue of a Cherokee Indian lay face downward across the walk, as the wind had blown it: bellying folds of canvas and tarpaulin hid the wreck of the poor man's stock-in-trade. Beyond this wreckage stood, in order, a vegetable stall, another sweetmeat stall, and a booth in which the boy (who cared little for sweetmeats, and, moreover, had just eaten his macaroon) took much more interest. For it was hung about with cages; and in the cages were birds of all kinds (but the most of them canaries), perched in the dull light of two horn lanterns, and asleep with open, shining eyes; and in the midst stood the proprietor, blowing delightful liquid notes upon a bird-call.

It fascinated Dicky; and he no sooner assured himself that the birds were really for sale—although no purchaser stepped forward—than there came upon him an overmastering desire to own a live canary in a cage and teach it with just such a whistle. (He had often wondered at the things upon which grown-up folk spent their money to the neglect of this world's true delights.) Edging his way to the stall, he was summoning up courage to ask the price of a bird, when the salesman caught sight him and affably spared him the trouble.

"Eh! here's my young lord wants a bird. . . . You may say what you like," said he, addressing the bystanders, "but there's none like the gentry for encouragin' trade. . . . And which shall it be sir? Here's a green parrot, now, I can recommend; or if your Honour prefers a bird that'll talk, this grey one. A beauty, see! And not a bad word in his repertory. Your honoured father shall not blame me for sellin' you a swearer."

The boy pointed to a cage on the man's right.

"A canary? . . . Well, and you're right. What is talk, after all, to compare with music? And chosen the best bird of my stock, you have; the pick of the whole crop. That's Quality, my friends; nothing but the best'll do for Quality, an' the instinct of it comes out young." The man, who was evidently an eccentric, ran his eye roguishly over the faces behind the boy and named his price; a high one—a very high one— but one nicely calculated to lie on the right side of public reprobation.

Dicky laid his guinea on the sill. "I want a whistle, too," he said, "and my change, please."

The bird-fancier slapped his breeches pockets.

"A guinea? Bless me, but I must run around and ask one of my neighbours to oblige. Any of you got the change for a golden guinea about you?" he asked of the crowd.

"We ain't so lucky," said a voice somewhere at the back. "We don't carry guineas about, nor give 'em to our bastards."

A voice or two—a woman's among them—called "Shame!" "Hold your tongue, there!"

Dicky had his back to the speaker. He heard the word for the first time in his life, and had no notion of its meaning; but in a dim way he felt it to be an evil word, and also that the people were protesting out of pity. A rush of blood came to his face. He gulped, lifted his chin, and said, with his eyes steady on the face of the blinking fancier,—

"Give it back to me, please, and I will get it changed."

He took the coin, and walked away resolutely with a set white face.
He saw none of the people who made way for him.

The bird-fancier stared after the small figure as it walked away into darkness. "Bastard?" he said. "There's Blood in that youngster, though he don't face ye again an' I lose my deal. Blood's blood, however ye come by it; you may take that on the word of a breeder. An' you ought to be ashamed, Sam Wilson—slingin' yer mud at a child!"

The word drummed in the boy's ears. What did it mean? What was the sneer in it? "Brat!" "cry-baby," "tell-tale," "story-teller," these were opprobrious words, to be resented in their degree; and all but the first covered accusations which not only must never be deserved, but obliged a gentleman, however young, to show fight. But "bastard"?

He felt that, whatever it meant, somehow it was worse than any; that honour called for the annihilation of the man that dared speak it; that there was weakness, perhaps even poltroonery, in merely walking away. If only he knew what the word meant!

He came to a halt opposite the drug store. He had once heard Dr. Lamerton, the apothecary at home, described as a "well-to-do" man. The phrase stuck in his small brain, and he connected the sale of drugs with wealth. (How, he reasoned, could any one be tempted to sell wares so nasty unless by prodigious profit?) He felt sure the drug-seller would be able to change the guinea for him, and walked in boldly. His ears were tingling, and he felt a call to assert himself.

There was a single customer in the store—a girl. With some surprise he recognised her for the girl who had beaten the flame out of the curtain.

She stood with her back to the doorway and a little sidewise by the counter, from behind which the drug-seller—a burly fellow in a suit of black—looked down on her doubtfully, rubbing his shaven chin while he glanced from her to something he held in his open palm.

"I'm askin' you," he said, "how you came by it?"

"It was given to me," the girl answered.

"That's a likely tale! Folks don't give money like this to a girl in your position; unless—"

Here the man paused.

"Is it a great deal of money?" she asked. There was astonishment in her voice, and a kind of suppressed eagerness.

"Oh, come now—that's too innocent by half! A guinea-piece is a guinea-piece, and a guinea is twenty-one shillings; and twenty-one shillings, likely enough, is more'n you'll earn in a year outside o' your keep. Who gave it ye?"

"A gentleman—the Collector—at the Inn just now.

"Ho!" said the drug-seller, with a world of meaning.

"But if," she went on, "it is worth so much as you say, there must be some mistake. Give it back to me, please. I am sorry for troubling you." She took a small, round parcel from her pocket, laid it on the counter, and held out her hand for the coin.

The drug-seller eyed her. "There must be some mistake, I guess," said he, as he gave back the gold piece. "No, and you can take up your packet too; I don't grudge two-pennyworth of salve. But wait a moment while I serve this small customer, for I want a word with you later. . . . Well, and what can I do for you, young gentleman?" he asked, turning to Dicky.

Dicky advanced to the shop-board, and as he did so the girl turned and recognised him with a faint, very shy smile.

"If you please," he said politely, "I want change for this—if you can spare it."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the man, staring. "What, another?"

"The bird-seller up the road had no change about him. And—and, if you please," went on Dick hardily, with a glance at the girl, "she hurt her hands putting out a fire just now. I expect my father gave her the money for that. But she must have burnt her hands dreffully!"—Dicky had not quite outgrown his infantile lisp—"and if she's come for stuff to put on them, please I want to pay for it."

"But I don't want you to," put in the girl, still hesitating by the counter.

"But I'd rather insisted Dicky.

"Tut!" said the drug-seller. "A matter of twopence won't break either of us. Captain Vyell's boy, are you? Well, then, I'll take your coppers on principle."

He counted out the change, and Dicky—who was not old enough yet to do sums—pretended to find it correct. But he was old enough to have acquired charming manners, and after thanking the drug-seller, gave the girl quite a grown-up little bow as he passed out.

She would have followed, but the man said, "Stay a moment. What's your name?"

"Ruth Josselin."

"Age?"

"I was sixteen last month."

"Then listen to a word of advice, Ruth Josselin, and don't you take money like that from fine gentlemen like the Collector. They don't give it to the ugly ones. Understand?"

"Thank you," she said. "I am going to give it back;" and slipping the guinea into her pocket, she said "Good evening," and walked swiftly out in the wake of the child.

The drug-seller looked after her shrewdly. He was a moral man.

Ruth, hurrying out upon the side-walk, descried the child a few paces up the road. He had come to a halt; was, in fact, plucking up his courage to go and demand the bird-cage. She overtook him.

"I was sent out to look for you," she said. "I oughtn't to have wasted time buying that ointment; but my hands were hurting me. Please, you are to come home and change your clothes for dinner."

"I'll come in a minute," said Dicky, "if you'll stand here and wait."

He might be called by that word again; and without knowing why, he dreaded her hearing it. She waited while he trotted forward, nerving himself to face the crowd again. Lo! when he reached the booth, all the bystanders had melted away. The bird-seller was covering up his cages with loose wrappers, making ready to pack up for the night.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully. "Thought I'd lost you for good."

He took the child's money and handed the canary cage across the sill; also the bird-whistle, wrapped in a scrap of paper. Many times in the course of a career which brought him much fighting and some little fame, Dicky Vyell remembered this his first lesson in courage—that if you walk straight up to an enemy, as likely as not you find him vanished.

But he had not quite reached the end of his alarms. As he took the cage, a parrot at the back of the booth uplifted his voice and squawked,—

"No prerogative! No prerogative! No prerogative!"

"You mustn't mind him," said the bird-seller genially. "He's like the crowd—picks up a cry an' harps on it without understandin'."

Master Dicky understood it no better; but thanked the man and ran off, prize in hand, to rejoin the girl.

They hurried back to the Inn. At the gateway she paused.

"I let you say what was wrong just now," she explained. "Your father didn't give me that money for putting out the fire."

Here she hesitated. Dicky could not think what it mattered, or why her voice was so timid.

"Oh," said he carelessly, "I dare say it was just because he liked you.
Father has plenty of money."

Chapter IV.

FATHER AND SON.

The dinner set before Captain Vyell comprised a dish of oysters, a fish chowder, a curried crab, a fried fowl with white sauce, a saddle of tenderest mutton, and various sweets over which Manasseh had thrown the elegant flourishes of his art. The wine came from the Rhone valley—a Hermitage of the Collector's own shipment. The candles that lit the repast stood in the Collector's own silver candlesticks. As an old Roman general carried with him on foreign service, packed in panniers on mule-back, a tessellated pavement to be laid down for him at each camping halt and repacked when the troops moved forward, so did Captain Vyell on his progresses of inspection travel with all the apparatus of a good table.

Dicky, seated opposite his father in a suit of sapphire blue velvet with buttons of cut steel, partook only of the fried fowl and of a syllabub. He had his glass of wine too, and sipped at it, not liking it much, but encouraged by his father, who held that a fine palate could not be cultivated too early.

By some process of dishing-up best known to himself (but with the aid, no doubt, of the "dam scullion") Manasseh, who had cooked the dinner, also served it; noiselessly, wearing white gloves because his master abominated the sight of a black hand at meals. These gloves had a fascination for Dicky. They attracted his eyes as might the intervolved play of two large white moths in the penumbra beyond the candle-light, between his father's back and the dark sideboard; but he fought against the attraction because he knew that to be aware of a servant was an offence against good manners at table.

His father encouraged him to talk, and he told of his purchase—but not all the story. Not for worlds—instinct told him—must he mention the word he had heard spoken. Yet he got so far as to say,—

"The people here don't like us—do they, father?"

Captain Vyell laughed. "No, that's very certain. And, to tell you the truth, if I had known you were wandering the street by yourself I might have felt uneasy. Manasseh shall take you for a walk to-morrow. One can never be sure of the canaille."

"What does that mean?"

Captain Vyell explained. The canaille, he said, were the common folk, whose part in this world was to be ruled. He explained further that to belong to the upper or ruling class it did not suffice to be well-born (though this was almost essential); one must also cultivate the manners proper to that station, and appear, as well as be, a superior. Nor was this all; there were complications, which Dicky would learn in time; what was called "popular rights," for instance—rights which even a King must not be allowed to override; and these were so precious that (added the Collector) the upper classes must sometimes fight and lay down their lives for them.

Dick perpended. He found this exceedingly interesting—the more so because it came, though in a curiously different way, to much the same as Miss Quiney had taught him out of the catechism. Miss Quiney had used pious words; in Miss Quiney's talk everything—even to sitting upright at table—was mixed up with God and an all-seeing Eye; and his father—with a child's deadly penetration Dicky felt sure of it—was careless about God.

This, by the way, had often puzzled and even frightened him. God, like a great Sun, loomed so largely through Miss Quiney's scheme of things (which it were more precise, perhaps, to term a fog) that for certain, and apart from the sin of it and the assurance of going to hell, every one removed from God must be sitting in pitch-darkness. But lo! when his father talked everything became clear and distinct; there was no sun at all to be seen, but there was also no darkness. On the contrary, a hundred things grew visible at once, and intelligible and common-sensible as Miss Quiney never contrived to present them.

This was puzzling; and, moreover, the child could not tolerate the thought of his father's going to hell—to the flames and unbearable thirst of it. To be sure Miss Quiney had never hinted this punishment for her employer, or even a remote chance of it, and Dicky's good breeding had kept him from confronting her major premise with the particular instance of his father, although the conclusion of that syllogism meant everything to him. Or it may be that he was afraid. . . . Once, indeed, like Sindbad in the cave, he had seen a glimmering chance of escape. It came when, reading in his Scripture lesson that Christ consorted by choice with publicans and sinners, he had been stopped by Miss Quiney with the information that "publican" meant "a kind of tax-collector." "Like papa?" asked the child, and held his breath for the answer. "Oh, not in the least like your dear papa," Miss Quiney made haste to assure him; "but a quite low class of person, and, I should say, connected rather with the Excise. You must remember that all this happened in the East, a long time ago." Poor soul! the conscientiousness of her conscience (so to speak) had come to rest upon turning such corners genteelly, and had grown so expert at it that she scarcely breathed a sigh of relief. The child bent his head over the book. His eyes were hidden from her, and she never guessed what hope she had dashed.

It was a relief then—after being forced at one time or another to put aside or pigeon-hole a hundred questions on which Miss Quiney's teaching and his father's practice appeared at variance—to find a point upon which the certainty of both converged. Heaven and hell might be this or that; but in this world the poor deserved their place, and must be kept to it.

"That seems fine," said Dicky, after a long pause.

"What seems fine?" His father, tasting the mutton with approval, had let slip his clue to the child's thought.

"Why, that poor people have rights too, and we ought to stand up for them—like you said," answered Dicky, not too grammatically.

"They are our rights too, you see," said his father.

Dicky did not see; but his eagerness jumped this gap in the argument. "Papa," he asked with a sudden flush, "did you ever stand up to a King on the poor people's side, and fight—and all that?"

"Well, you see"—the Collector smiled—"I was never called upon.
But it's in the blood. Has Miss Quiney ever told you about Oliver
Cromwell?"

"Yes. He cut off King Charles's head. . . . I don't think Miss Quiney liked him for that, though she didn't say so."

The Collector was still smiling. "He certainly helped to cut off King Charles's head, and—right or wrong—it's remembered against him. But he did any amount of great things too. He was a masterful man; and perhaps the reason why Miss Quiney held her tongue is that he happens to be an ancestor of ours, and she knew it."

"Oliver Cromwell?" Dicky repeated the name slowly, with awe.

"He was my great-great-grandfather, and you can add on another 'great' for yourself. I am called Oliver after him. They even say," added Captain Vyell, sipping his wine, "that I have some of his features; and so, perhaps, will you when you grow up. But of your chance of that you shall judge before long. I am having a copy of his portrait sent over from England."

For a moment or two these last remarks scarcely penetrated to the boy's hearing. Like all boys, he naturally desired greatness; unlike most, he was conscious of standing above the crowd, but without a guess that he derived the advantage from anything better than accident. His father had the good fortune to be rich. For himself—well, Dicky was born with one of those simple natures that incline rather to distrust than to overrate their own merits. None the less he desired and loved greatness—thus early, and throughout his life—and it came as a tremendous, a magnificent shock to him that he enjoyed it as a birthright. The repetition of "great"—"he was my great-great-grandfather;" "you can add another 'great' for yourself"— hummed in his ears. A full half a minute ticked by before he grasped at the remainder of his father's speech, and, like a breaking twig, it dropped him to bathos.

"But—but—" Dicky passed a hand over his face—"Miss Quiney said that
Oliver Cromwell was covered with warts!"

Captain Vyell laughed outright.

"Women have wonderful ways of conveying a prejudice. Warts? Well, there, at any rate, we have the advantage of old Noll." The Collector, whose sense of hearing was acute and fastidious, broke off with a sharp arching of the eyebrows and a glance up at the ceiling, or rather (since ceiling there was none) at the oaken beams which supported the floor overhead. "Manasseh," he said quickly, "be good enough to step upstairs and inform our landlady that the pitch of her voice annoys me. She would seem to be rating a servant girl above."

"Yes, sah."

"Pray desire her to take the girl away and scold her elsewhere."

Manasseh disappeared, and returned two minutes later to report that "the woman would give no furdah trouble." He removed the white cloth, set out the decanters with an apology for the mahogany's indifferent polish, and withdrew again to prepare his master's coffee.

At once a silence fell between father and son. Dicky had expected to hear more of Oliver Cromwell. He stared across the dull shine of the table at his parent's coat of peach-coloured velvet and shirt front of frilled linen; at the lace ruffle on the wrist, the signet ring on the little finger, the hand—firm, but fine—as it reached for a decanter or fell to playing with a gold toothpick. He loved this father of his with the helpless, concentred love of a motherless child; admired him, as all must admire, only more loyally. To feel constraint in so magnificent a presence was but natural.

It would have astonished him to learn that his father, lolling there so easily and toying with a toothpick, shared that constraint. Yet it was so. Captain Vyell did not understand children. Least of all did he understand this son of his begetting. He could be kind to him, even extravagantly, by fits and starts; desired to be kind constantly; could rally and chat with him in hearing of a third person, though that third person were but a servant waiting at table. But to sit alone facing the boy and converse with him was a harder business, and gave him an absurd feeling of gene; and this (though possibly he did not know it) was the real reason why, having brought Dicky in the coach for a treat, he himself had ridden all day in saddle.

Dicky was the first to resume conversation.

"Papa," he asked, still pondering the problem of rich and poor, "don't some of the old families die out?"

"They do."

"Then others must come up to take their place, or the people who do the ruling would come to an end."

"That's the way of it, my boy." The Collector nodded and cracked a walnut. "New families spring up; and a devilish ugly show they usually make of it at first. It takes three generations, they say, to breed a gentleman; and, in my opinion, that's under the mark."

"And a lady?"

"Women are handier at picking up appearances; 'adaptable' 's the word. But the trouble with them is to find out whether they have the real thing or not. For my part, if you want the real thing, I believe there are more gentlemen than gentlewomen in the world; and Batty Langton says you may breed out the old Adam, but you'll never get rid of Eve. . . . But, bless my soul, Dicky, it's early days for you to be discussing the sex!"

Dicky, however, was perfectly serious.

"But I do mean what you call the real thing, papa. Couldn't a poor girl be born so that she had it from the start? Oh, I can't tell what I mean exactly—"

"On the contrary, child, you are putting it uncommonly well; at any rate, you are making me understand what you mean, and that's the A and Z of it, whether in talk or in writing. 'Is there—can there be—such a thing as a natural born lady?' that's your question, hey?" The Collector peeled his walnut and smiled to himself. In other company—Batty Langton's, for example—he would have answered cynically that to him the phenomenon of a natural born lady would first of all suggest a doubt of her mother's virtue. "Well, no," he answered after a while; "if you met such a person, and could trace back her family history, ten to one you'd discover good blood somewhere in it. Old stocks fail, die away underground, and, as time goes on, are forgotten; then one fine day up springs a shoot nobody can account for. It's the old sap taking a fresh start. See?"

Dicky nodded. It would take him some time work out the theory, but he liked the look of it.

His drowsed young brain—for the hour was past bedtime—applied it idly to a picture that stood out, sharp and vivid, from the endless train of the day's impressions: the picture of a girl with quiet, troubled eyes, composed lips, and hands that beat upon a blazing curtain, not flinching at the pain. . . . And just then, as it were in a dream, he beat of her hands echoed in a soft tapping, the door behind his father opened gently, and Dicky sat up with a start, wide awake again and staring, for the girl herself stood in the doorway.

Chapter V.

RUTH.

"Hey, what is it?" the Collector demanded, slewing himself to the half-about in his chair.

The girl stepped forward into the candle-light. Over her shoulders she wore a faded plaid, the ends of which her left hand clutched and held together at her bosom.

"Your Honour's pardon for troubling," she said, and laying a gold coin on the table, drew back with a slight curtsy. "But I think you gave me this by mistake; and now is my only chance to give it back. I am going home in a few minutes."

The Collector glanced at the coin, and from that to the girl's face, on which his eyes lingered.

"Gad, I recollect!" he said. "You were the wench that pulled off my boots?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, upon my honour, I forget at this moment if I gave it by mistake or because of your face. No, hang me!" he went on, while she flushed, not angrily, but as though the words hurt her, "it must have been by mistake. I couldn't have forgot so much better a reason."

To this she answered nothing, but put forward her hand as if to push the coin nearer.

"Certainly not," said he, still with eyes on her face. "I wish you to take it. By the way, I heard the landlady's voice just now, letting loose upon somebody. Was it on you?"

"Yes."

"And you are going home to-night, you say. Has she turned you out?"

"Yes." The girl's hand moved as if gathering the plaid closer over her bosom. Her voice held no resentment. Her eyes were fixed upon the coin, which, however, she made no further motion to touch; and this downward glance showed at its best the lovely droop of her long eyelashes.

The Collector continued to take stock of her, and with a growing wonder.

The lower half of the face's oval was perhaps Unduly gaunt and a trifle overweighted by the broad brow. The whole body stood a thought too high for its breadth, with a hint of coltishness in the thin arms and thick elbow-joints. So judged the Collector, as he would have appraised a slave or any young female animal; while as a connoisseur he knew that these were faults pointing towards ultimate perfection, and at this stage even necessary to it.

For assurance he asked her, "How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"That's as I guessed," said he, and added to himself, "My God, this is going to be one of the loveliest things in creation!" Still, as she bent her eyes to the coin on the table, he ran his appraising glance over her neck and shoulders, judging—so far as the ugly shawl permitted—the head's poise, the set of the coral ear, the delicate wave of hair on the neck's nape.

"Why is she turning you out?"

"A window curtain took fire. She said it was my fault."

"But it was not your fault at all!" cried Dicky. "Papa, the curtain took fire in my room, and she beat it out. The whole house might have been burnt down but for her. She beat it out, and made nothing of it, though it hurt her horribly. Look at her hands, papa!"

"Hold out your hands," his father commanded.

She stretched them out. The ointment, as she turned them palms upward, shone under the candle rays.

"Turn them the other way," he commanded, after a long look at them. The words might mean that the sight afflicted him, but his tone scarcely suggested this. She turned her hands, and he scrutinised the backs of them very deliberately. "It's a shame," said he at length.

"Of course it's a shame!" the boy agreed hotly. "Papa, won't you ring for the landlady and tell her so, and then she won't be sent away."

"My dear Dicky," his father answered, "you mistake. I was thinking that it was a shame to coarsen such hands with housework." He eyed the girl again, and she met him with a straight face—flushed a little and plainly perturbed, but not shrinking, although her bosom heaved—for his admiration was entirely cool and critical. "What is your name?" he asked.

"Ruth Josselin."

He appeared to consider this for a moment, and then, reaching out a hand for the decanter, to dismiss the subject. "Well, pick up your guinea," he said. "No doubt the woman outside has treated you badly; but I can't intercede for you, to keep you a drudge here among the saucepans; no, upon my conscience, I can't. The fact is, Ruth Josselin, you have the makings of a beauty, and I'll be no party to spoiling 'em. What is more, it seems you have spirit, and no woman with beauty and spirit need fail to win her game in this world. That's my creed." He sipped his wine.

"If your Honour pleases," said the girl quietly, picking up the coin, "the woman called me bad names, and I was not wanting you at all to speak for me."

"Oho!" The Collector set down his glass and laughed. "So that's the way of it—'Nobody asked you, sir, she said.' Dicky, we sit rebuked."

"But—" she hesitated, and then went on rapidly in the lowest of low tones—"if your Honour wouldn't mind giving me silver instead of gold? They won't change gold for me in the town; they'll think I have stolen it. Most Sundays I'm allowed to take home broken meats to mother and grandfather, and to-night I shan't be given any, now that I'm sent away. They'll be expecting me, and indeed, sir, I can't bear to face them—or I wouldn't ask you. I beg your Honour's pardon for saying so much."

"Hullo!" exclaimed the Collector. "Why, yes, to be sure, you must be grandchild to the old man of the sea—him that I met on the beach this afternoon, t'other side of the headland. Lives in a hovel with a wood pile beside it, and a daughter that looks out for wreckage?"

"Your Honour spoke with them?" Into Ruth's face there mounted a deeper tide of colour. But whereas the first flush had been dark with distress, this second spread with a glow of affection. Her eyes seemed to take light from it, and shone.

"I spoke with the old man. Since you have said so much, I may say more.
I gave him food; he was starving."

She bent her head. Her hands moved a little, with a gesture most pitiful to see. "I was afraid," she muttered, "with these gales, and no getting to the oyster beds."

"He took some food, too, to his daughter, with a bottle of wine, as I remember."

A bright tear dropped. In the candle-light Dicky saw it splash on the back of her hand, by the wrist.

"God bless your Honour!" Dicky could just hear the words.

The door opened and Manasseh entered, bearing the coffee on a silver tray.

"Manasseh," said his master, "take that guinea and bring me change for it. If you have no silver in the treasury get the landlady to change it for you."

Manasseh was affronted. His hand came near to shaking as he poured and handed the coffee.

"Yo' Hon'ah doan off'n use de metal," he answered. "Dat's sho'.
But whiles an' again yo' Hon'ah condescends ter want it. Dat bein' so,
I keep it by me—an' polished. I doan fetch yo' Hon'ah w'at any low
trash has handled."

He withdrew, leaving this fine shaft to rankle, and by-and-by entered with a small velvet bag, from the neck of which he shook a small cascade of silver coins, all exquisitely polished.

"Count me out change for a guinea," commanded his master.

Manasseh obeyed.

"Now empty the bag, put into it what you have counted, and sweep up the rest."

Manasseh dropped in the coins one by one, and tied the neck of the bag with its silken ribbon. The Collector took it from him and tossed it to the girl.

"Here—catch!" said he carelessly.

But her burnt hands shrank from closing on if, and it fell to the floor. She stooped, recovered it, and slipped it within her bodice. As she rose erect again her eyes rested in wonder on the black servant who with a crumb-brush was sweeping the rest of the money off the table and catching it upon the coffee-salver. The rain and clash of the coins appeared to confuse her for a moment. Then with another curtsy and a "Thank your Honour," she moved to the door.

"But wait," said the Collector sharply, on a sudden thought. "You are not meaning to walk all the way home, surely?"

"Yes."

"At this hour?"

"The wind has gone down. I do not mind the dark, and the distance is nothing. . . . Oh, I forgot: your Honour thinks that, with all this money, some one will try to rob me?"

The Collector smiled. "You would appear to be a very innocent young woman," he said. "I was not, as a fact, thinking of the money."

"Nobody will guess that I am carrying so much," she said simply; "so it will be quite safe."

"Nevertheless this may help to give you confidence," said he. Feeling in the breast pocket of his laced satin waistcoat, he drew forth a diminutive pistol—a delicate toy, with a pattern of silver foliated over the butt. "It is loaded," he explained, "and primed; though it cannot go off unless you pull back the trigger. At close quarters it can be pretty deadly. Do you understand firearms?"

"Grandfather has a fowling-piece," she answered; "and, now that his sight has failed, on Sundays I try to shoot sea-birds for him. He says that I have a good eye. But last week the birds had all flown inland, because of the gale."

"Then take this. It is nothing to carry, and you may feel the safer for it."

She put up a hand to decline. "Why should I need it?"

"We'll hope you will not. But do as I bid you, girl. I shall be passing back along the beach in two days' time, and will call for it."

She resisted no longer.

"I will take it," she said. "By that time I may have thought of words to thank your Honour."

She curtsied again.

"Manasseh!" Captain Vyell pointed to the door. The negro opened it and stood aside majestically as she passed out and was gone.

Let moralists perpend. Ruth Josselin had knocked at that door after a sharp struggle between conscience and crying want. The poverty known to Ruth was of the extreme kind that gnaws the entrails with hunger. It had furthermore starved her childhood of religion, and her sole code of honour came to her by instinct. Yet she had knocked at the door with no thought but that the Collector's guinea had come to her hand by mistake, and no expectancy but that the Collector would thank her and take it back. She was shy, moreover. It had cost courage.

"Honesty is the best policy." True enough, no doubt. Yet, when all is said, but for some radical instinct of honesty, untaught, brave to conquer a more than selfish need, Ruth had never brought back her guinea. And, yet again, from that action all the rest of this story flows. When we have told it, let the moralists decide.

Chapter VI.

PARENTHETICAL—OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.

Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon pedigree: and here, as well in compliment to him as to make our story clearer, we will interrupt it with a brief account of his family and descent.

The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house of Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood, may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept. It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with no less than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought on the winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West, had held estates there and been people of importance ever since.

The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands. Yet they kept themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by developing certain tin mines on his estate and working them by new processes, set up the family fortunes once more.

His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them. A contemporary narrative describes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very good estate. His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver) first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made him Commissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the Post Office. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity and honesty, hath continued him in the office of Postmaster. He is a gentleman of a sweet, easy, affable disposition—a handsome man, of middle stature, towards forty years old." This was written in 1713. Sir Thomas died in 1726, of the smallpox, having issue (by his one wife, who survived him but a few years) seven sons and three daughters.

1. Thomas, the third Baronet: of whom anon.

2. William, who became a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a page to Queen Mary, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. A memoir of the time preserves him for us as "a tall sanguineman, with a merry eye and talkative in his cups." He married a Walpole, but his children died young.

3. John, who, going on a diplomatic mission to Hamburg, took a fever and died there, unmarried.

4. Henry, the father of our Collector. He married Jane, second daughter of the Marquis of Lomond; increased his wealth in Bengal as governor of the East India Company's Factory, and while yet increasing it, died at Calcutta in 1728. His children were two sons, Oliver and Henry, with both of whom our story deals.

5. Algernon, who went to Jesus College, Cambridge, became a Fellow there, practised severe parsimony, and dying unmarried in 1742, had his eyes closed by his college gyp and weighted with two penny pieces—the only coins found in his breeches pocket. He left his very considerable savings to young Oliver, whom he had never seen.

6. Frederick Penwarne, barrister-at-law. We shall have something to do
with him.

7. Roger, who traded at Calcutta and making an expedition to the
Persian Gulf, was killed there in a chance affray with some Arabs.

8. Anne, who married Sackville.

9. Frances Elizabeth, who married Pelham.

10. Arabella, whose affections went astray upon a young Cornish yeoman. Her family interfering, the match was broken off and she died unmarried.

Oliver and Henry, born at Calcutta, were for their health's sake sent home together—he one aged four, the other three—to be nurtured at Carwithiel. Here under the care of their grandparents, Sir Thomas and Lady Vyell (the Protector's grand-daughter), they received instruction at the hands—often very literally at the hands—of the Rev. Isaac Toplady, Curate in Charge of Carwithiel, a dry scholar, a wet fly-fisher, and something of a toad-eater. They had for sole playmate and companion their Cousin Diana, or Di, the seven-year-old daughter of their eldest uncle, Thomas, heir to the estates and the baronetcy.

This Thomas—a dry, peevish man, averse from country pursuits, penurious and incurably suspicious of all his fellow-men—now occupied after a fashion and with fair diligence that place in public affairs from which his father had, on approach of age, withdrawn. He sat in Parliament for the family borough of St. Michael, and by family influence had risen to be a Lord of the Admiralty. He had married Lady Caroline Pett, a daughter of the first Earl of Portlemouth, and the pair kept house in Arlington Street, where during the session they entertained with a frugality against which Lady Caroline fought in vain. They were known (and she was aware of it) as "Pett and Petty," and her life was embittered by the discovery, made too late, that her husband was in every sense a mean man, who would never rise and never understand why not, while he nursed an irrational grudge against her for having presented him with a daughter and then ceased from child-bearing.

Unless she repented and procured him a male heir, the baronetcy would come to him only to pass at his death to young Oliver; and the couple, who spent all the Parliamentary recesses at Carwithiel because Mr. Thomas found it cheap, bore no goodwill to that young gentleman. He en revanche supplied them with abundant food for censure, being wilful from the first, and given in those early years to consorting with stable-boys and picking up their manners and modes of speech. The uncle and aunt alleged—and indeed it was obvious—that the unruly boys passed on the infection to Miss Diana. Miss Diana never accompanied her parents to London, but had grown up from the first at Carwithiel—again because Mr. Thomas found it cheap.

In this atmosphere of stable slang, surrounded by a sort of protective outer aura in their grandparents' godliness, the three children grew up: mischievous indeed and without rein, but by no means vicious. Their first separation came in 1726 when Master Oliver, now rising ten, left for London, to be entered at Westminster School. Harry was to follow him; and did, in a twelve-month's time; but just before this happened, in Oliver's summer holidays. Sir Thomas took the smallpox and died and went to his tomb in the Carwithiel transept. Harry took it too; but pulled through, not much disfigured. Oliver and Diana escaped.

The boys, to whom their grandfather—so far as they regarded him at all—had mainly presented himself as a benevolent old proser, were surprised to find that they sincerely regretted him; and the events of the next few weeks threw up his merits (now that the time was past for rewarding them) into a sharp light which memory overarched with a halo. Tenderly into that halo dissolved his trivial faults—his trick, for example, of snoring between the courses at dinner, or of awaking and pulling his fingers till they cracked with a distressing sound. These and other small frailties were forgotten as the new Sir Thomas and his spouse took possession and proceeded in a few weeks to turn the place inside out, dismissing five of the stable-boys, cutting down the garden staff by one-third, and carrying havoc into the housekeeper's apartments, the dairy, the still-room.

In these dismissals I have no doubt that Sir Thomas and Lady Caroline hit (as justice is done in this world) upon the chief blackguards. But the two boys, asking one another why So-and-so had been marked down while This-other had been spared, and observing that the So-and-so's included an overbalancing number of their own cronies, found malice in the discrimination, and a malice directed with intent upon themselves.

Young Oliver, as soon as Harry was convalescent, discussed this vehemently with him. Harry, weak with illness, took it passively. He was destined for the Navy. To him already the sea meant everything: as a child of three, on his voyage home in the Mogul East Indiaman, he had caught the infection of it; on it, as offering the only career fit for a grown man, his young thoughts brooded, and these annoyances were to him but as chimney-pots and pantiles falling about the heads of folks ashore. But he agreed that Di's conduct needed explaining. She had taken a demure turn, and was not remonstrating with her parents as she ought—not playing fair, in short. "It must be pretty difficult for her," said Harry. "I don't see," said Oliver.

The two boys went back to Westminster together. They spent the Christmas holidays with their Uncle Frederick, the barrister, who practised very little at the law either in court or in chambers, hut dwelt somewhat luxuriously in the Inner Temple and lived the life of a man-about-town. Their summer vacation was to be spent at Carwithiel; but, as it happened, they were not to see Carwithiel again, for before summer came news of their father's death at Calcutta. He had amassed a fortune which, translated out of rupees, amounted to 400,000 pounds. To his widow, in addition to her jointure, he left a life interest of a thousand pounds per annum; a sum of 20,000 pounds was set aside for Harry, to accumulate until his twenty-first birthday; while the magnificent residue in like manner accumulated for young Oliver, the heir.

Lady Jane returned to England, to live in decent affluence at Bath; and at Bath, of course, Oliver and Harry spent their subsequent holidays, while their Uncle Frederick continued by occasional dinners and gifts of pocket money, by outings down the river to Greenwich, by seats at the theatre or at state shows and pageants, to mitigate the rigours of school. Had it occurred to Oliver Vyell in later life to set down his "Reflections" in the style of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, he might have begun them in some such words as these: "From my mother, Lady Jane Vyell, I learned to be proud of good birth, to esteem myself a gentleman, and to regulate my actions by a code proper to my station in life. This code she reconciled with the Gospels, and indeed, she rested it on the rock of Holy Scripture. From my Uncle Frederick I learned that self-interest was the key of life; that the teachings of the priest-hood were more or less conscious humbug; that all men could be bought; that their god was vanity, and the Great Revolution the noblest event in English history. . . ."

The sane infusion of Father Neptune in Master Harry's blood preserved him from these doctrines, and before long indeed removed him out of the way of hearing them. Soon after his fifteenth birthday he sailed to learn his profession shipping (by a fiction of the service), as "cabin boy" under his mother's brother. Lord Robert Soules, then commanding the Merope frigate.

Oliver proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and thence (without waiting for a degree) to make the Grand Tour; in the course of which and in company with his cousin, Dick Pelham, and a Mr. Batty Langton, a Christ Church friend, he visited Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, and Constantinople, returning through Rome again and by way of Venice, Switzerland, Paris. He reached home to find that his mother, who believed in keeping young men employed, had procured him a cornetcy in Lord Lomond's Troop of Horse. He was now in possession of an ample fortune. He would certainly succeed to the baronetcy, and to the Vyell acres, which were mostly entailed.

But the grave itself could not give lessons in greed to a true Whig family of that period. Lady Jane had it in her blood, every tradition of it. Her son (though within a few months he rose to command of a troop) detested all military routine save active service. He despised the triumphs of the Senate. To keep him out of mischief—or, rather, as you shall hear, to extricate him from it—the good dame made application to the Duke of Newcastle; and so in the year 1737, at the age of twenty-one, Captain Oliver Vyell was appointed to the lucrative post of Collector to the port of Boston.

He had held it, now, for close upon seven years.

Chapter VII.

A SABBATH-BREAKER.

Now, in his twenty-eighth year, Oliver Vyell, handsome of face, standing six feet two inches in his stockings, well built and of iron constitution, might fairly be called a sensual man, but not fairly a sensualist. The distinction lay in his manliness. He was a man, every inch of him.

He enjoyed hard riding even more than hard gaming, and far more than hard drinking; courted fatigue as a form of bodily indulgence; would tramp from twenty to thirty miles in any weather on a chance of sport; loved the bite of the wind, the shock of cold water; and was a bold swimmer in a generation that shunned the exercise.

He awoke next morning to find the sun shining in on his window after a boisterous night. He looked at his watch and rang a small bell that stood on the table by his bed. Within ten seconds Manasseh appeared, and was commanded first to draw up the blind and then, though the hour was early, to bring shaving-water with all speed.

While the negro went on his errand Captain Vyell arose, slipped on his dressing-gown, and strolled to the window. It looked upon the ocean, over a clean stretch of beach that ran north-west, starting from the pier-head of the harbour and fringing the town's outskirt. Half a dozen houses formed this outskirt or suburb—decent weather-boarded houses standing in their own gardens along a curved cliff overlooking the beach. The beach was of hardest sand, and just beneath the Collector's window so level that it served for a second bowling-green, or ten-pin-alley. Thus it ran out for some twenty rods and then shelved abruptly. Captain Vyell, who had an eye for such phenomena, judged that this bank had formed itself quite recently, since the building of the pier.

A heavy sea was running, and evidently with a strong undertow. When Manasseh returned with the hot water, Captain Vyell announced that he would bathe before taking his chocolate.

"Yo' Hon'ah will bathe befor' shaving?"

"You d——d fool, did you ever know me do _any_thing before shaving?"

Manasseh chose a razor, stropped it, and worked the shaving soap into a lather.

"Beggin' yo' Hon'ah's pardon," said he, "it bein' de Lawd's Day, an' these Port Nassau people dam' ig'orant—"

"Hand me the peignoir," commanded his master sharply.

He sat, and was shaved. Then, having sponged his chin, he ordered Manasseh to lay out his bathing-dress, retire, find a back way to the beach and, having opened all doors, attend him below. He indued himself in his bathing-dress very deliberately, standing up for a minute stark naked in the sunshine flooding through the open window—a splendid figure, foretasting battle with the surf.

Then, having drawn on his bathing-dress and thrust his feet into sand-shoes, he cast his dressing-gown again over him and went down the stairs at a run. The doors stood open, and on the beach the negro awaited him in the right attitude of "attention." To him he tossed his wrap and shoes, and ran down to the beach as might swift-footed Achilles have run to be clasped by the Sea-Goddess his mother.

Through the shallow wavelets he ran, stepping high and delicately splashing merry drops against the morning sunlight, leaped over one or two that would have "tilled" him to the knee (to use an old boyish phrase learnt at Carwithiel where he had learnt to swim), and came to the shelf beyond which the first tall comber boomed towards him, more than head high, hissing along its ridge. There, as it overarched him, he launched his body forward and shot through the transparent green, emerging beyond the white smother with a thrill and a laugh of sheer physical delight. Thrice he repeated this,—

"Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave,
Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in. . ."

passed the fourth wave, gained deep water, and thrust out to sea with a steady breast-stroke, his eyes all the while on the great embracing flood which, stretch as it might from here to Europe, for the moment he commanded.

Manasseh watched him from the beach. From the cliff above two scandalised householders calling to one another across their gardens' boundary pointed seaward and summoned their families to the windows to note the reprobate swimmer and a Sabbath profaned.

The eyes of a long-shore population are ever on the sea from which comes their livelihood, and nothing on the sea escapes them long. The Collector's head by this time was but a speck bobbing on the waves, but ere he turned back for shore maybe two hundred of Port Nassau's population were watching, from various points. The Port Nassauers, whatever their individual frailties, were sternly religious—nine-tenths of them from conviction or habit, the rest in self-defence—and Sabbatarians to a man. The sight of that heathen slave, Manasseh, waiting on the beach with a bath-gown over his arm, incensed them to fury. Growls were uttered, here and there, that if the authorities knew their business this law-breaker—for Sabbath-breaking was an indictable offence—should be seized on landing, haled naked to justice, and clapped in the town stocks; but fortunately this indignation had no concert and found, for the moment, no leader.

The Collector, having swum out more than half a mile, turned and sped back, using a sharp side-stroke now with a curving arm that cleft the ridges like the fin of a fish. His feet touched earth, and he ran up through the pursuing breakers—a fleet-footed Achilles again, glittering from the bath. Manasseh hurried down to throw his mantle over the godlike man.

"Towel me here," was the panting command. And, lo! slipping off his bathing-dress and standing naked to the sea. Captain Vyell was towelled under the eyes of Port Nassau, and flesh-brushed until he glowed (it may be) as healthily as did the cheeks of those who spied on him. On this question the Muse declines to take sides. For certain his naked body, after these ministrations, glowed delicious within the bath-gown as he mounted again to his Olympian chamber. There he allowed Manasseh to wash out his locks in fresh water (the Collector had a fine head of hair, of a waved brown, and detested a wig), to anoint them, and tie them behind with a fresh black ribbon. This done, he took his clothes one by one as Manasseh handed them, and arrayed himself, humming the while an air from Opera, and thus unconsciously committing a second offence against the Sabbath.

He descended to find Dicky already seated at table, awaiting him. Dicky had slept like a top in spite of the strange bed; and awaking soon after daybreak, had lain cosily listening to the boom of the sea. To him this holiday was a glorious interlude in the regime of Miss Quiney. His handsome father did not kiss him, but merely patted him on the shoulder as he passed to his chair; and to Dick (though he would have liked a kiss) it seemed just the right manly thing to do.

They talked merrily while Manasseh brought in the breakfast dishes—for Master Dicky bread-and-milk followed by a simple steak of cod; a bewildering succession of chowder, omelet, devilled kidneys, cold ham, game pie, and fruit for the Collector, who professed himself keen-set as a hunter, and washed down the viands with a tankard of cider. He described his bathe, and promised Dicky that he should have his first swimming lessons next summer. "I must talk about you to your Uncle Harry. Craze for the sea? At your age if he saw a puddle of water he must stick his toes in it. He's cruising just now, off South Carolina, keeping a look-out for guarda-costas. He'll render an account of them, you may be sure. He writes that he may be coming up Boston way any time now. Oh, I can swim, but for diving you should see your Uncle Harry— off the yard-arm—body taut as a whip—nothing like it in any of the old Greeks' statues. Plenty of talk about bathing; but diving? No. In the east, must go south to the Persian Gulf to see diving. The god Hermes descending on Ogygia—if you could imagine that, you had Uncle Harry— the shoot outwards, the delicate curve to a straight slant, heels rising above rigid body while you counted, begad! holding your breath. Then the plumb drop, like a gannet's—"

Dicky listened, glorious vistas opening before him. With the fruit Manasseh brought coffee; and still the boy sat entranced while his father chatted, glowing with exercise and enjoying a breakfast at every point excellent.

It was in merest thoughtlessness, no doubt, that having arranged for Dicky's morning walk, and after smoking a tobacco leaf rolled with an art of which Manasseh possessed the secret, the Collector so timed his message to the stables that his groom brought the horse Bayard around to the Inn door just as the Sabbath bells began tolling for divine worship. For as a sceptic he was careless rather than militant; ridiculing religion only in his own set, and when occasion arose, and then without fanaticism. For such piety as his mother's he had even a tolerant respect; and in any event had too much breeding to affront of set purpose the godly townsfolk of Port Nassau. At the first note of the bells he frowned and blamed himself for not having started earlier. But he had already made appointment by letter to meet the Surveyor and the Assistant Surveyor at noon on the headland, to measure out and discuss the site of the proposed fortification; and he was a punctilious man in observing engagements.

It may be asked how, if civil to other men's scruples, he had come to make such an appointment for the Sabbath. He had answered this and (as he hoped) with suitable apologies in his letter to the surveyor, Mr. Wapshott: explaining that as His Majesty's business was bringing him to Port Nassau, so it obliged him to be back at Boston by such-and-such a date. He was personally unacquainted with this Mr. Wapshott, who had omitted the courtesy of calling upon him at the Bowling Green, and whom by consequence he was inclined to set down as a person of defective manners. But Mr. Wapshott was, after all, in the King's service and would understand its exigencies.

He mounted therefore and rode up the street. The roadway was deserted; but along the side-walk, sober families, marching by twos and threes, turned their heads at the sound of Bayard's hoofs on the cobbles. The Collector set his face and passed them with a grave look, as of one absorbed in affairs of moment. Nevertheless, coming to the whitewashed Church where the streams of worshippers converged and choking the porchway overflowed upon the street, he added the courtesy of doffing his hat as he rode by. He did this still with a set face, looking straight between Bayard's ears; but with the tail of his eye caught one glimpse of a little comedy which puzzled and amused him.

A small rotund, red-gilled man, in bearing and aspect not unlike a turkey-cock, was mounting the steps of the portico. Behind this personage sailed an ample lady of middle age, with a bevy of younger damsels—his spouse and daughters doubtless. Suddenly—and as if, at sight of the Collector, a whisper passed among them—the middle-aged lady shot out a hand, arrested her husband by the coat-tail and drew him down a step, while the daughters ranged themselves in semicircle around him, spreading their skirts and together effacing him from view, much as a hen covers her offspring.

The Collector laughed inwardly as he replaced his hat, and rode on speculating what this bit of by-play might mean. But it had passed out of his thoughts before he came to the outskirts of the town.

Chapter VIII.

ANOTHER SABBATH-BREAKER.

The road—the same by which he had arrived last night—mounted all the way and led across the neck of the headland. His business, however, lay out upon the headland itself and almost at its extremest verge; and a mile above the town he struck off to the left where a bridle-path climbed by a long slant to the ridge. Half an hour's easy riding brought him to the top of the ascent, whence he looked down on the long beach he had travelled yesterday. The sea lay spread on three sides of him. Its salt breeze played on his face; and the bay horse, feeling the tickle of it in his nostrils, threw up his head with a whinny. "Good, old boy—is it not?" asked the Collector, patting his neck. "Suppose we try a breather of it?"

The chine of the headland—of turf, short-cropped by the unceasing wind—stretched smooth as a racecourse for close upon a mile, with a gentle dip midway much like the hollow of a saddle. The Collector ran his eye along it in search of the two men he had come to meet, but could spy neither of them.

"Sheltering somewhere from the breeze, maybe," he decided. "We don't mind it, hey? Come along, lad—here's wine for heroes!"

He touched Bayard with the spur, and the good horse started at a gallop—a rollicking gallop and in the very tune of his master's mood; and if all Port Nassau had not been at its devotions, the chins of its burghers might have tilted themselves in wonder at the apparition—a Centaur, enlarged upon the skyline.

Man and horse at full stretch of the gallop were launching down the dip of the hollow—the wind singing past on the top note of exhilaration— when the bay, too well trained to shy, faltered a moment and broke his stride, as a figure started up from the lee-side of the ridge.

The Collector sailing past and throwing a glance over his shoulder, saw the figure and lifted a hand. In another ten strides he reined up Bayard, turned, and came back at a walk.

He confronted a lean, narrow-chested young man, black-suited, pale of face, with watery eyes, straw-coloured eyelashes and an underbred smile that twitched between timidity and assurance.

"Ah?" queried the Collector, eyeing him and disliking him at sight.
"Are you "—doubtfully—"by any chance Mr. Wapshott, the Surveyor?"

"No such luck," answered the watery-eyed young man with an offhand attempt at familiarity. "I'm his Assistant—name of Banner—Wapshott's unwell."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Mr.—Mr. Wapshott—sends word that he's unwell." Under the Collector's eye the youth suddenly shifted his manner and became respectful.

"I beg your pardon?" the Collector repeated slowly. "He 'sends word,' do you say? I had not the honour at my Inn—from which I have ridden straight—to be notified of Mr. Wapshott's indisposition."

Mr. Banner attempted a weak grin and harked back again to familiarity.

"No, I guess not. The fact is—"

"Excuse me; but would you mind taking your hands out of your pockets?"

"Oh, come! Why?" But none the less Mr. Banner removed them.

"Thank you. You were saying?"

"Well, I guess, between you and me"—Mr. Banner's hands were slipping to his pockets again but he checked the motion and rested a palm nonchalantly on either hip—"the old man was a bit too God-fearing to sign to it."

"You mean," the Collector asked slowly, "that he is not, in fact, unwell, but has asked you to convey an untruth?"

"You've a downright way of putting it—er—sir" Mr. Banner confessed; "but you get near enough, I shouldn't wonder. You see, the old—the Surveyor is strict upon Lord's Day Observance."

The Collector bent his brows slightly while he smoothed Bayard's mane. Of a sudden the small scene by the Church porch recurred to him. "Stay," he said. "I have not the pleasure of knowing Mr. Wapshott, but may I attempt to describe him to you? He is, perhaps, a gentleman of somewhat stunted growth, but of full habit, and somewhat noticeably red between the ear and the neck-stock?"

"That hits him."

"—with a wife inclining to portliness and six grown daughters, taller than their parents and not precisely in their first bloom. I speak," added the Collector, still eyeing his victim, "as to a man of the world."

"You've seen him anyhow," Mr. Banner nodded. "That's Wapshott."

"I saw him entering his place of worship; and I note that he thinks what you call the Lord's Day well worth keeping at the cost of a falsehood. May I ask, Mr.—" The Collector hesitated.

"Banner."

"Ah, yes—pardon me! May I ask, Mr. Banner, how it comes that you have a nicer sense than your superior of what is due to His Majesty's Service?"

Mr. Banner laughed uneasily. "Well, you mightn't guess it from my looks," he answered with an attempt to ingratiate himself by way of self-deprecation, "but I am pretty good at working out levels. I really am."

"That was not my point, though I shall test you on it presently.
You are, it appears, a somewhat less rigid Sabbatarian than Mr.
Wapshott?"

Hereupon Mr. Banner became cryptic. "You needn't fear about that," he answered. "I have what they call a dispensation; and until you startled me, I was up here keeping the Lord's Day as well as the best of 'em. Better, perhaps."

"We will get to business," said the Collector. "Follow me, please."

He wheeled his horse and, with Mr. Banner walking at his stirrup, rode slowly out to the end of the headland and as slowly back. The Collector asked a question now and then and to every question the young man responded pat. He was no fool. It soon appeared that he had studied the trajectory of guns, that he had views—and sound ones—on coast defences, and that by some study of the subject he had come, a while ago, to a conclusion the Collector took but a few minutes to endorse; that to build a fort on this headland would be waste of public money.

Professionally, Mr. Banner was tolerable. The Collector, consulting with him, forgot the pertness of his address, the distressing twang of his accent. He had dismounted, and the pair were busy with a tape, calling out and checking measurements, when from the southward there was borne to the Collector's ears the distant crack of a shot-gun.

At the sound of it he glanced up, in time to see Mr. Banner drop the other end of the tape and run. Almost willy-nilly he followed, vaguely wondering if there had happened some accident that called for aid.

Mr. Banner, when the Collector overtook him, had come to a halt overlooking the long beach, and pointed to a figure—a speck almost—for it was distant more than a mile.

"That Josselin girl!" panted Mr. Banner. "I call you to witness!"

The Collector unstrapped his field-glass, which he carried in a bandolier, adjusted it, and through it scanned the beach. Yes, in the distant figure he recognised Ruth Josselin. She carried a gun—or rather, stood with the gun grounded and her hands folded, resting on its muzzle—and appeared to be watching the edge of the breakers, perhaps waiting for them to wash to her feet a dead bird fallen beyond reach.

"See her, do you? I call you to witness!" repeated the voice at his elbow.

"Why, what is the matter?"

"Sabbath breakin'," answered Mr. Banner with a curious leer.

"Ah!"

"But you yourself don't take much account of the Lord's Day, seemingly.
Bathin', f'r instance."

"Indeed!" The Collector eyed his companion reflectively. "You honoured me with your observation this morning?"

Mr. Banner grinned. "Better say the whole of Port Nassau was hon'rin' you. Oh, there'd be no lack of evidence!—but I guess the magistrates were lookin' the other way. They allowed, no doubt, that even a Sabbath-breaker might be havin' friends at Court!"

The Collector could not forbear smiling at the youth's impudence.

"May I ask what punishment I have probably escaped by that advantage?"

"Well," said Mr. Banner, "for lighter cases it's usually the stocks."

Still the Collector smiled. "I am trying to picture it," said he, after a pause. "But you don't tell me they would put a young girl in the stocks, merely for firing a gun on the Lord's Day, as you call it?"

"Wouldn't they!" Mr. Banner chuckled. "That, or the pillory."

"You are a strange folk in Port Nassau." The Collector frowned, upon a sudden suspicion, and his eyes darkened in their scrutiny of Mr. Banner's unpleasant face. "By the way, you told me just now that you were here upon some sort of a dispensation. Forgive me if I do you wrong, but was it by any chance that you might play the spy upon this girl?"

"Shadbolt asked me to keep an eye liftin' for her."

"Who is Shadbolt?"

"The Town Beadle. He's watchin' somewhere along the cliffs."
Mr. Banner waved a hand towards the neck of the headland.
"It's a scandal, and by all accounts has been goin' on for weeks."

"So that is why you called me to witness? Well, Mr. Banner, I have a horsewhip lying on the turf yonder, and I warn you to forget your suggestion. . . . Shall we resume our measurements?—and, if you please, in silence. Your presence is distasteful to me."

They turned from the cliff and went back to their work, in which—for they both enjoyed it—they were soon immersed. It may have been, too, that the wind had shifted. At any rate they missed to hear, ten minutes later, a second shot fired on the beach, not more distant but fainter than the first.

Chapter IX.

THE SCOURGE.

Next morning, at ten o'clock, the Collector's coach-and-six stood at the Inn gate, harnessed up and ready for the return journey. In the road-way beyond one of the grooms waited with a hand on Bayard's bridle.

The Collector, booted and spurred, with riding-whip tucked under his arm, came up the pebbled pathway, drawing on his gauntleted gloves. Dicky trotted beside him. Manasseh followed in attendance. Behind them in the porchway the landlady bobbed unregarded, like a piece of clockwork gradually running down.

"Hey!" The Collector, as he reached the gate, lifted his chin sharply— threw up his head as a finely bred animal scents battle or danger. "What's this? A riot, up the street?"

The grooms could not tell him, for the sound had reached their ears but a second or two before the question; a dull confused murmur out of which, as it increased to a clamour and drew nearer, sharper outcries detached themselves, and the shrill voices of women. A procession had turned the corner of the head of the avenue—a booing, howling rabble.

The Collector stepped to his horse's rein, flung himself into saddle, and rode forward at a foot's pace to meet the tumult.

Suddenly his hand tightened on the rein, and Bayard came to a halt; but his master did not perceive this. The hand's movement had been nervous, involuntary. He sat erect—stood, rather, from the stirrup—his nostril dilated, his brain scarcely believing what his eyes saw.

"The swine!" he said slowly, to himself. His teeth were shut and the words inaudible. "The swine!" he repeated.

Men have done, in the name of religion and not so long ago—indeed are perhaps doing now and daily—deeds so vile that mere decency cannot face describing them. It is a question if mere decency (by which I mean the good instinct of civilised man) will not in the end purge faith clean of religion; if, while men dispute and hate and inflict cruelty for religion, they are not all the while outgrowing it. Libraries, for example, are written to prove that unbaptized infants come out of darkness to draw a fleeting breath or two and pass to hell-fire; the dispute occupies men for generations—and lo! one day the world finds it has no use for any such question. Time—no thanks to the theologians— has educated it, and this thing at any rate it would no longer believe if it could, as it certainly cannot. Faith never yet has burnt man or woman at the stake. Religion has burnt its tens of thousands.

Behind the first two or three ranks of the mob—an exultant mob of grown men, grown women, and (worst of all) little children—plodded a grey horse, drawing a cart. Behind the cart, bound to it, with a thong tight about her fire-scorched wrists—But no; it is not to be written.

They had stripped her to the waist, and then for decency—their decency!—had thrown a jacket of coarse sacking over her, lacing it loosely in front with pack-thread. But, because their work required it, this garment had been gathered up into a rope at the neck, whence it dangled in folds over her young breast.

She walked with wide eyes, uttering no sound. She alone of that crowd uttered no sound. A brute with a bandaged jaw walked close behind her. Oliver Vyell saw his forearm swing up—saw the scourge whirl in his fist—met the girl's eyes. . . . She, meeting his, let escape the first and last cry she uttered that day. He could have sworn that her face was scarlet; but no, he was wrong; while he looked he saw his mistake-she was white as death. Then with that one pitiful cry she sank among the close-pressing crowd; but her hands, by the cord's constraint, still lifted themselves as might a drowning swimmer's; and the grey horse—the one other innocent creature in that procession—plodded forward, dragging her now senseless body at the cart's tail.

"You swine!"

It does a man good sometimes to get in his blow. It did Oliver Vyell good, riding in, to slash twice crosswise on the brute's bandaged face; to feel the whalebone bite and then, as he swung out of saddle, to ram fist and whip-butt together on the ugly mouth, driving in its fore-teeth.

"Stop the horse, some one!" he commanded, as the Beadle reeled back.
"She has fainted." He added, "The first man that interferes, I shoot."

The crowd growled. He turned on the nearest mutterer—"Your knife!" The fellow handed it; so promptly, he might have been holding it ready to proffer. The Collector stooped and cut the thongs. This done, he stood up and saw the Beadle advancing again, snarling through the bloody gap in his mouth.

"You had best take that man away," said the Collector quietly, pulling out his small pistol. "If you don't, I am going to kill him." They heard and saw that he meant it. He added in the same tone, "I am going to take all responsibility for this. Will you make way, please?"

His first intention was to lift the body lying unconscious in the roadway, carry it to the coach and drive out of Port Nassau with it, defying the law to interfere. For the moment he "saw red," as we say nowadays, and was quite capable of shooting down, or bidding his servants shoot down, any man who offered to hinder. It is even possible that had he acted straightway upon the impulse, he might, with his momentary mastery of the mob, have won clean away; possible, but by no means likely, for already a couple of constables were pushing forward to support the Beadle, and half a dozen broad-shouldered fellows—haters of "prerogative"—had recovered themselves and were ranging up to support the law. Had he noted this, it would not have daunted him. What he noted, and what gave him pause, was the girl's white back at his feet, upturning its hideous weals. He stooped to lift her, and drew back, shivering delicately at the thought of hurting the torn flesh in his arms—a vain scruple, since she had passed for the moment beyond pain. He picked up the scourge, and stood erect again, crushing it into his pocket.

"Will you make way, please," he ordered, "while I fetch a cover to hide your blasted handiwork?"

He strode through them, and they fell back to give him passage. He walked straight to the coach, pulled the door open, and, in the act of dragging forth a rug, caught sight of Dicky's small, scared face.

"Oh papa, what has happened?"

"An accident, child. Jump inside; I will explain by-and-by."

"Begging your Honour's pardon"—a heavy-featured fellow, who had followed the Collector to the coach, put out a hand and touched the child's shoulder—"I don't hold in whipping maidens, and if it's a fight I'm with you. But you can't carry her out of it, the way you're meaning. They've seen blood, same as yourself. This child of yours—he stands as much chance to be hurt as any, if you push it. Your Honour'll have to find some other way."

The Collector glanced over his shoulder, and saw that the man spoke truth.

"Dicky," he said easily, but in a voice the child durst not disobey, "there has been an accident. Go you down and amuse yourself on the sands till Manasseh calls you."

He walked back coolly, carrying the rug on his arm.

"Where was she to be taken?" he asked.

"To the stocks!" answered a voice or two. "To the Court-house!" said others.

"It's the same thing," said the heavy-browed man, at the Collector's elbow. "The stocks are just across the square from the Court-house. You'll find the magistrates there; they're the ones to face. They took her case first this morning, and this is the first part of her sentence."

Oliver Vyell walked back to the crowd. It was—a glance assured him— more hostile than before; had recovered from its surprise, and was menacing. But it gave way again before him.

He called on them to give more room. He stooped and, spreading the rug over the girl's body, lifted and laid her in the straw of the cart. A constable would have interfered. The Collector swung round on him.

"You are taking her back to the Court-house? Well, I have business there too. Where is your Court-house?"

The constable pointed.

"Up the road? I am obliged to you. Drive on, if you please."

Chapter X.

THE BENCH.

The wooden Jail and the wooden Court-house of Port Nassau faced one another across an unpaved grass-grown square planted with maples. To-day—for the fall of the leaf was at hand—these maples flamed with hectic yellows and scarlets; and indeed thousands of leaves, stripped by the recent gales, already strewed the cross-walks and carpeted the ground about the benches disposed in the shade—pleasant seats to which, of an empty afternoon, wives brought their knitting and gossiped while their small children played within sight; haunts, later in the day, of youths who whittled sticks or carved out names with jack-knives—ancient solace of the love-stricken; rarely thronged save when some transgressor was brought to the stocks or the whipping-post.

These instruments of public discipline stood on the northern side of the square, before the iron-studded door of the Jail. The same hand, may be, that had blackened over the Jail's weather-boarded front with a coat of tar, had with equal propriety whitewashed the facade of the Court-house; an immaculate building, set in the cool shade, its straight-lined front broken only by a recessed balcony, whence, as occasion arose, Mr. George Bellingham, Chief Magistrate, delivered the text of a proclamation, royal or provincial, or declared the poll when the people of Port Nassau chose their Selectmen.

This morning Mr. Bellingham held session within, in the long, airy Court-room, and dispensed justice with the help of three fellow-magistrates—Mr. Trask, Mr. Somershall, and our friend Mr. Wapshott. They sat at a long baize-covered table, with the Justices' Clerk to advise them. On the wall behind and above their heads hung a framed panel emblazoned with the royal escutcheon, the lion and unicorn for supporters, an inscription in old French to the effect that there is shame in evil-thinking, and another:—

CAR II.

FID DEF.

distributed among the four corners of the panel, with the date 1660 below. This had been erected (actually in 1664, but the artist had received instructions to antedate it) when the good people of Massachusetts after some demur rejoiced in the Restoration and accepted King Charles II. as defender of their Faith.

The four magistrates had dealt (as we know) with a case of Sabbath-breaking; had inflicted various terms of imprisonment on two drunkards and a beggar-woman; had discharged for lack of evidence (but with admonition) a youth accused of profane swearing; and were now working through a list of commoner and more venial offences, such as cheating by the use of false weights.

These four grave gentlemen looked up in slightly shocked deprecation; for the Collector entered without taking account of the constable at the door, save to thrust him aside. The Clerk called "Silence in the Court!" mechanically, and a deputy-beadle at his elbow as mechanically repeated it.

"Your Worships"—the Collector, hat in hand advanced to the table and bowed—"will forgive an interruption which only its urgency can excuse."

"Ah! Captain Vyell, I believe?" Mr. Bellingham arose from his high-backed throne of carved oak, bowed, and extended a hand across the table. "I had heard that you were honouring Port Nassau with a visit; but understanding from our friend Mr. Wapshott that the visit was—er— not official—that, in fact, it was connected with government business not—er—to be divulged, I forbore to do myself the pleasure—" Mr. Bellingham had a courtly manner and a courtly presence. He was a tallish man, somewhat thin in the face and forehead, of classical features, and a sanguine complexion. He came of a family highly distinguished in the history of Massachusetts; but he was in fact a weak man, though he concealed this by some inherited aptitude for public business and a well-trained committee manner.

"I thank you." The Collector shook the preferred hand and bowed again. "You will pardon my abruptness? A girl has fainted outside here, in the street—"

Mr. Bellingham's well-shaped brows arched themselves a trifle higher.

"Indeed?" he murmured, at a loss.

"A young girl who—as I understand—was suffering public punishment under sentence of yours."

"Yes?" Mr. Bellingham's smile grew vaguer, and his two hands touched finger-tips in front of his magisterial stomach—an adequate stomach but well on the right side of grossness. He glanced at his fellow-magistrates right and left. "It—er—-sometimes happens," he suggested.

"I dare say." Captain Vyell took him up. "But she has fainted under the punishment. She has passed the limit of her powers, poor child; and they tell me that what she has endured is to be followed, and at once, by five hours in the stocks. Gentlemen, I repeat I am quite well aware that this is most irregular—you may call it indecent; but I saw the poor creature fall, and, as it happens, I know something that might have softened you before you passed sentence."

Here the Clerk interposed, stiffening the Chief Magistrate, who wore a smile of embarrassed politeness.

"As His Honour—as Captain Vyell—suggests, your Worships, this is quite irregular."

"To be sure—to be sure—of course," hemm'd Mr. Bellingham. "We can only overlook that, when appealed to by a person of your distinction;" here he inclined himself gently. "Still, you will understand, a sentence is a sentence. As for a temporary faintness, that is by no means outside our experience. Our Beadle—Shadbolt—invariably manages to revive them sufficiently to endure—er—the rest."

I'll be shot if he will this time, thought the Collector grimly, with a glance down at a smear across the knuckle of his right-hand glove. The sight of it cheered him and steadied his temper. "Possibly," said he aloud. "But your worships may not be aware—and as merciful men may be glad to hear—that this poor creature's offence against the Sabbath was committed under stress. Her mother and grandfather have starved this week through, as I happen to know."

"That may or may not be," put in Mr. Trask—a dry-complexioned, stubborn, malignant-looking man, seated next on the Chairman's right. "But the girl—if you mean Ruth Josselin—has not been scourged for Sabbath-breaking. For that she will sit in the stocks—our invariable sentence for first offenders in this respect." From under his down-drawn brows Mr. Trask eyed the Collector malevolently. "Ruth Josselin," he continued, "has suffered the scourge for having resisted Beadle Shadbolt in the discharge of his duty, and for unlawful wounding."

"Excuse me," put in Mr. Somershall, speaking across from the Chairman's left. Mr. Somershall was afflicted with deafness, but liked to assert himself whenever a word by chance reached him and gave him a cue. He leaned sideways, arching a palm around his one useful ear. "Excuse me; we brought it in 'attempted wounding,' I believe? I have it noted so, here on the margin of my charge-sheet." He glanced at the Clerk, who nodded for confirmation.

"It didn't matter," Mr. Trask snapped brutally. "She got it, just the same."

"Oh, quite so!" Mr. Somershall took his hand from his ear and nodded, satisfied with having made his point.

"Wounding?" echoed the Collector, addressing the Chairman. "To be frank with you, sir, I had not heard of this—though it scarcely affects my plea."

Mr. Bellingham smiled indulgently. "Say no more, Captain Vyell—pray say no more! This is not the first time an inclination to deem us severe has been corrected by a fuller acquaintance with the facts. . . . Yes, yes—chivalrous feeling—I quite understand; but you see—" He concluded his sentence with a gentle wave of the hand. "You will be glad to hear, since you take an interest in the girl, that Providence overruled her aim and Shadbolt escaped with a mere graze of the jaw—so slight, indeed, that, taking a merciful view, we decided not to consider it an actual wound, and convicted her only of the attempt. By the way, Mr. Leemy, where is the weapon?"

The Clerk produced it from his bag and laid it on the table.
Captain Vyell drew a sharp breath.

"It is my pistol."

"Eh?"

"I have the fellow to it here." He pulled out the other and handed it by the muzzle.

"To be sure—to be sure; the pattern is identical," murmured Mr.
Bellingham, examining it and for the moment completely puzzled.
"You—er—suggest that she stole it?"

"Certainly not. I lent it to her."

There followed a slow pause. It was broken by the grating voice of Mr.
Trask—

"You remember, Mr. Chairman, that the prisoner stubbornly refused to tell how the pistol came in her possession? Does Captain Vyell give us to understand that his interest in this young woman is of older date than this morning's encounter?"

"My interest in her—such as it is—dates, sir, from the evening before last, when she was dismissed from the Bowling Green Inn. The hour was late; her home, as you know, lies at some distance—though doubtless within the ambit of your authority. I lent her this small weapon to protect herself should she be molested."

"And she used it next day upon the Beadle! Dismissed, you say? Why was she dismissed?"

"I regret that I was not more curious at the time," answered the Collector with the politest touch of weariness. "I believe it was for saving the house from fire—something of that sort. As told to me, it sounded rather heroical. But, sir—" he turned again to the Chairman—" I suggest that all this does not affect my plea. Whatever her offence, she has suffered cruelly. She is physically unfit to bear this second punishment; and when I tell you on my word as a gentleman—or on oath, if you will—that on Saturday I found her grandparent starving and that her second offence was committed presumably to supply the household wants, surely I shall not entreat your mercy in vain?"

The Chief Magistrate hesitated, and a frown showed his annoyance.
"To tell you the truth, Captain Vyell, you put me in a quandary.
I do not like to refuse you—" Here he glanced right and left.

"But it can't be done," snapped Mr. Trask. Mr. Wapshott, sitting just beyond, shook his head gently and—as he hoped—unperceived by the Collector.

"You see, sir," explained Mr. Bellingham with a sigh, "we sit here to administer justice without fear or favour. You see also to what scandal it might give rise if a culprit—merely on the intercession of a gentleman like yourself—influential—er—and, in short—"

"—In short, sir," the Collector broke in, "you have in the name of justice committed one damnable atrocity upon this child, and plead your cowardice as an excuse for committing another. Influential, am I? And you prate to me of not being affected by that? Very well; I'll take you at your word. This girl resisted your ruffian in the discharge of his duty? So did I just now, and with such effect that he will resume it neither to-day nor to-morrow. She inflicted, it appears, a slight graze on his chin. I inflicted two cuts on his face and knocked in three of his teeth. You can take cognisance of my wounding, I promise you. Now, sir, will you whip me through your town?"

"This is mere violence, sir." Mr. Bellingham's face was flushed, but he answered with dignity. "The law is as little to be exasperated as defied."

"I will try you in another way, then," said the Collector, recovering grip of his temper and dropping his voice to a tone of politest insolence. "It is understood that you have not the courage to do this because, seated here and administering what you call justice, you have, each one of you, an eye upon England and preferment, and you know well enough that to touch me would play the devil among the tailors with your little ambitions. I except"—with a bow towards Mr. Trask—"this gentleman, who seems to have earned his influence on your counsels by rugged force of character, And—" for here Mr. Trask, who enjoyed a dig at his colleagues, cast his eyes down and compressed a grin—"is, I should judge, capable of striking a woman for the mere fun of it." Here Mr. Bellingham and Mr. Wapshott looked demure in turn; for that Mr. Trask led his wife a dog's life was notorious.

"—In truth, gentlemen," the Collector continued easily, "I am at some loss in addressing you, seeing that through some defect of courtesy you have omitted to wait on me, albeit informed (I believe) that I came as His Majesty's Commissioner, and that therefore I have not even the pleasure of knowing your names. I may except that of Mr. Wapshott, whom I am glad to see convalescent this morning." Here he inclined to Mr. Wapshott, whose gills under the surprised gaze of his colleagues took a perceptibly redder tinge. "Mr. Wapshott, gentlemen," explained the Collector, smiling, "had a slight attack of vertigo yesterday, on the steps of his Place of Worship. Well, sirs, as I was saying, I will try you in another way. You have not the courage to bring me to trial for assaulting your beadle. You have not even the courage, here and now, to throw me out. I believe, however, that upon a confessed breach of the law—supported by evidence, if necessary—I can force you to try me. The Clerk will correct me if I am wrong. . . . Apparently he assents. Then I desire to confess to you that yesterday, at such-and-such an hour, I broke your laws or bye-laws of Lord's Day Observance; by bathing in the sea for my pleasure. I demand trial on this charge, and, if you convict me—here you can hardly help yourselves, since to my knowledge some of you witnessed the offence—I demand my due punishment of the stocks."

"Really—really, Captain Vyell!" hemm'd the Chief Magistrate.
"Passing over your derogatory language, I am at a loss to understand—"

"Are you? Yet it is very simple. Since you reject my plea for this poor creature, I desire to share her punishment."

"Let him," snapped the mouth of Mr. Trask again, opening and shutting like a trap.

"You at any rate, sir, have sense," the Collector felicitated him and turned to the Chief Magistrate. "And you, sir, if you will oblige me, may rest assured that I shall bear the magistracy of Port Nassau no grudge whatever."

Chapter XI.

THE STOCKS.

In the end they came to a compromise. That Dame Justice should be hustled in this fashion—taken by the shoulders, so to speak, forced to catch up her robe and skip—offended the Chief Magistrate's sense of propriety. It was unseemly in the last degree, he protested. Nevertheless it appeared certain that Captain Vyell had a right to be tried and punished; and the Clerk's threat to set down the hearing for an adjourned sessions was promptly countered by the culprit's producing His Majesty's Commission, which enjoined upon all and sundry "to observe the welfare of my faithful subject, Oliver John Dinham de Courcy Vyell, now travelling on the business of this my Realm, and to further that business with all zeal and expedition as required by him"—a command which might be all the more strictly construed for being loosely worded. To be sure the Court might by dilatory process linger out the hearing of the Weights and Measures cases—one of which was being scandalously interrupted at this moment—or it might adjourn for dinner and reassemble in the afternoon, by which time the sands of Ruth Josselin's five hours' ignominy would be running out. But here Mr. Somershall had to be reckoned with. Mr. Somershall not only made it a practice to sit long at dinner and sleep after it; he invariably lost his temper if the dinner-hour were delayed; and, being deaf as well as honest, he was capable of blurting out his mind in a fashion to confound either of these disingenuous courses. As for Mr. Wapshott, the wording of the Commission had frightened him, and he wished himself at home.

It was Mr. Trask who found the way out. Mr. Trask, his malevolent eye fixed on the Collector, opined that after all an hour or two in the stocks would be a salutary lesson for hot blood and pampered flesh. He suggested that, without insisting on a trial, the Captain might be obliged, and his legs given that lesson. He cited precedents. More than once a friend or relative had, by mercy of the Court, been allowed to sit beside a culprit under punishment. If, a like leave being granted him, Captain Vyell preferred to have his ankles confined—why, truly, Mr. Trask saw no reason for denying him the experience. But the Captain, it was understood, must give his word of honour, first, to accept this as a free concession from the Bench, and, secondly, not to repent or demand release before the expiry of the five hours.

"With all my heart," promised Captain Vyell; and the Chief Magistrate reluctantly gave way.

Ruth Josselin sat in the stocks. She had come so far out of her swoon that her pulse beat, her breath came and went, she felt the sun warm on her face, and was aware of some pain where the edge of the wood pressed into her flesh, a little above the ankle-bones—of discomfort, rather, in comparison with the anguish throbbing and biting across her shoulder-blades. Some one—it may have been in unthinking mercy—had drawn down the sackcloth over her stripes, and the coarse stuff, irritating the raw, was as a shirt of fire.

She had come back to a sense of this torture, but not yet to complete consciousness. She sat with eyes half closed, filmed with suffering. As they had closed in the moment of swooning, so and with the same look of horror they awoke as the lids parted. But they saw nothing; neither the sunlight dappling the maple shadows nor the curious faces of the crowd. She felt the sunlight; the crowd's presence she felt not at all.

But misery she felt; a blank of misery through which her reviving soul— like the shoot of a plant trodden into mire—pushed feebly towards the sunlight that coaxed her eyes to open. Something it sought there . . . a face . . . yes, a face. . . .

—Yes, of course, a face; lifted high above other faces that were hateful, hostile, mocking her misery—God knew why; a strong face, not very pitiful—but so strong!—and yet it must be pitiful too, for it condescended to help. It was moving down, bending, to help. . . .

—What had become of it? . . . Ah, now (shame at length reawakening) she remembered! She was hiding from him. He was strong, he was kind, but above all he must not see her shame. Let the earth cover her and hide it! . . . and either the merciful earth had opened or a merciful darkness had descended. She remembered sinking into it—sinking—her hands held aloft, as by ropes. Then the ropes had parted. . . . She had fallen, plumb. . . .

She was re-emerging now; and either shame lay far below, a cast-off weed in the depths, or shame had driven out shame as fire drives out fire. Her back was burning; her tongue was parched; her eyes were seared as they half opened upon the crowd. The grinning faces—the mouths pulled awry, mocking a sorrow they did not understand—these were meaningless to her. She did not, in any real sense, behold them. Her misery was a sea about her, and in the trough of it she looked up, seeking one face.

—And why not? It had shone far above her as a god's; but she had been sucked down as deep again, and there is an extreme of degradation may meet even a god's altitude on equal terms. Stark mortal, stark god—its limit of suffering past, humanity joins the celestial, clasping its knees.

Of a sudden, turning her eyes a little to the left, she saw him.

He had come at a strolling pace across the square, with Manasseh and the deputy-beadle walking wide beside him, and the Court-house rabble at his heels, but keeping, in spite of themselves, a respectful distance. At the stocks he faced about, and they halted on the instant, as though he had spoken a word of command. He smiled, seated himself leisurably at the end of the bench on Ruth Josselin's left, and extended a leg for Manasseh to draw off its riding-boot. At the back of the crowd a few voices chattered, but within the semicircle a hush had fallen.

It was then that she turned her eyes and saw him.

How came he here? What was he doing? . . . She could not comprehend at all. Only she felt her heart leap within her and stand still, as like a warm flood the consciousness of his presence stole through her, poured over her, soothing away for the moment all physical anguish. She sat very still, her hands in her lap; afraid to move, afraid even to look again. This consciousness—it should have been shame, but it held no shame at all. It was hope. It came near, very near, to bliss.

She was aware in a dull way of some one unlocking and lifting the upper beam of the stocks. Were they releasing her? Surely her sentence had been for five hours?—surely her faintness could not have lasted so long! This could not be the end? She did not wish to be released. She would not know what to do, where to go, when they set her free. She must walk home through the town, and that would be worst of all.

Or perhaps he was commanding them to release her? . . . No; the beam creaked and dropped into place again. A moment ago his voice had been speaking; speaking very cheerfully, not to her. Now it was silent. After some minutes she gathered courage to turn her eyes again.

Captain Vyell sat with his legs in durance. They were very shapely legs, cased in stockings of flesh-coloured silk with crimson knee-ties. He sat in perfect patience, and rolled a tobacco-leaf between his fingers. At his shoulder stood Manasseh like a statue, with face immobile as Marble—black marble—and a tinder-box ready in his hand.

"Why? . . ."

He could not be sure if it were a word, or merely a sigh, deep in her breast, so faintly it reached him. She had murmured it as if to herself, yet it seemed to hang on a question. His ear was alert.

"Hush!" he said, speaking low and without glancing towards her, for the eyes of the crowd were on them. "The faintness is over?"

"Yes."

"Do not talk at all. By-and-by we will talk. Now I am going to ask you a selfish question, and you are just to bend your head for 'yes' or 'no.' Will the smell of tobacco distress you, or bring the faintness back? These autumn flies sting abominably here, under the trees."

She moved her head slowly. "I do not feel them," she said after a while.

He glanced at her compassionately before nodding to Manasseh for a light. "No, poor wretch, I'll be sworn you do not," he muttered between the puffs. "Thank you, Manasseh; and now will you step down to the Inn, order the horses back to stable, and bring George and Harry back with you? I may require them to break a head or two here, if there should be trouble. Tell Alexander"—this was the coachman—"to have an eye on Master Dicky, and see that he gets his dinner. The child is on no account to come here, or be told about this. His papa is detained on business—you understand? Yes, and by the way, you may extract a book from the valise—the Calderon, for choice, or if it come handier, that second volume of Corneille. Don't waste time, though, in searching for this or that. In the stocks I've no doubt a book is a book: the instrument has a reputation for levelling."

Manasseh departed on his errand, and for a while the Collector paid no heed to his companion. He and she were now unprotected, at the mercy of the mob if it intended mischief; and the next few minutes would be critical.

He sat immersed apparently in his own thoughts, and by the look on his face these were serious thoughts. He seemed to see and yet not to see the ring of faces; to be aware of them, yet not concerned with them, no whit afraid and quite as little defiant. True, he was smoking, but without a trace of affected insouciance or bravado; gravely rather, resting an elbow on his groin and leaning forward with a preoccupied frown. Two minutes passed in this silence, and he felt the danger ebbing. Mob insolence ever wants a lead, and—perhaps because with the return of fine weather the fishing-crews had put to sea early—this Port Nassau crowd lacked a fugleman.

"Are you here—because—of me?"

"Hush, again," he answered quietly, not turning his head. "I like you to talk if you feel strong enough; but for the moment it will be better if they do not perceive. . . . Yes, and no," he answered her question after a pause. "I am here to see that you get through this. You are in pain?"

"Yes; but it is easier."

"You are afraid of these people?"

"Afraid?" She took some time considering this. "No," she said at length. "I am not afraid of them. I do not see them. You are here."

He took the tobacco-leaf from his lips, blew a thin cloud of smoke with grave deliberateness, and in doing so contrived to glance at her face.

"You have blood in you. That face, too, my beauty," he muttered, "never came to you but by gift of blood." Aloud he said, "That's brave. But take care when your senses clear and the strain comes back on you. Speak to me when you feel it coming; I don't want it to tauten you up with a jerk. You understand?"

"Yes. . . ."

"I wonder now—" he began musingly, and broke off. The danger he had been keeping account with was over; Manasseh had returned with the two grooms, and they—perfectly trained servants on the English model—took their posts without exhibiting surprise by so much as a twitch of the face. George in particular was a tight fellow with his fists, as the crowd, should it offer annoyance, would assuredly learn. The Collector took the volume which Manasseh brought him, and opened it, but did not begin to read. "You despise these people?" he asked.

He was puzzled with himself. He was here to protect her; and this, from him to her, implied a noble condescension. His fine manners, to be sure, forbade his showing it; on no account would he have shown it. But the puzzle was, he could not feel it.

She met his eyes. "No . . . why should I despise them?"

"They are canaille."

"What does that mean? . . . They have been cruel to me. Afterwards, I expect, they will be crueller still. But just now it does not matter, because you are here."

"Does that make so much difference?" he asked thoughtlessly.

She caught her breath upon a sob. "Ah, do not—" The voice died, strangled, in her throat. "Do not—" Again she could get no further, but sat shivering, her fingers interlocked and writhing.

"Brute!" muttered the Collector to himself. He did not ask her pardon, but opened his Calderon, signed to Manasseh to roll a fresh tobacco-leaf, and fell to reading his favourite Alcalde de Zalamea.

The sun crept slowly to the right over the tops of the maples. It no longer scorched their faces, but slanted in rays through the upper boughs, dappling the open walks with splashes of light which, as they receded in distance, took by a trick of the eyesight a pattern regular as diaper. By this time the Collector, when he glanced up from his book, had an ample view of the square, for the crowd had thinned. The punishment of the stocks was no such rare spectacle in Port Nassau; and five hours is a tedious while even for the onlooker—a very long while indeed to stand weighing the fun of throwing a handful of filth against the cost of a thrashing. The men-folk, reasoning thus, had melted away to their longshore avocations. The women, always more patient—as to their nature the show was more piquant than to the men's—had withdrawn with their knitting to benches well within eyeshot. The children, playing around, grew more and more immersed in their games; which, nevertheless, one or another would interrupt from time to time to point and ask a question. Above the Court-house the town clock chimed its quarters across the afternoon heat.

The Collector, glancing up in the act of turning a page, spied Mr. Trask hobbling down an alley towards the Jail. Mr. Trask, a martyr to gout, helped his progress with an oaken staff. He leaned on this as he halted before the stocks.

"Tired?" he asked.

"Damnably!" answered the Collector with great cheerfulness. "It takes one in the back, you see. If ever the Town Fathers think of moving this machine, you might put in a word for shifting it a foot or two back, against the prison wall."

Mr. Trask grinned.

"I suppose now," he said after a pause, "you think you are doing a fine thing, and doing it handsomely?"

"I had some notion of the sort, but this confinement of the feet is wonderfully cooling to the brain. No—if you dispute it. Most human actions are mixed."

Mr. Trask eyed him, chin between two fingers and thumb. When he spoke again it was with lowered voice. "Is it altogether kind to the girl?" he asked.

"Eh?" The Collector in turn eyed Mr. Trask.

"Or even quite fair to her?"

"Oh, come!" said the Collector. "Tongues? I hadn't thought of that."

"I dare say not." Mr. Trask glanced up at the windows of a two-storeyed house on the left, scarcely a stone's throw away, a respectable mansion with a verandah and neat gateway of wrought iron. "But at the end of this what becomes of her?"

The Collector shrugged his shoulders. "I have thought of that, at all events. My coach will be here to take her home. It lies on my road. As for me, I shall have to mount at once and ride through the night—a second test for the back-bone."

"Ride and be hanged to you!" broke out Mr. Trask with a snarl of scorn. "But for the rest, if your foppery leave you any room to consider the girl, you couldn't put a worse finish on your injury. Drive her off in your coach indeed!—and what then becomes of her reputation?"

"—Of what you have left to her, you mean? Damn it—you to talk like this!"

"Do not be profane, Captain Vyell. . . . We see things differently, and this punishment was meted to her—if cruelly, as you would say—still in honest concern for her soul's good. But if you, a loose-living man—" Mr. Trask paused.

"Go on."

"I thank you. For the moment I forgot that you are not at liberty. But I used not that plainness of speech to insult you; rather because it is part of the argument. If you, then, drive away with this child in public, through this town, you do her an injury for which mere carelessness is your best excuse; and the world will assign it a worse."

"The world!"

"I mean the world this young woman will have to live in. But we talk at cross-purposes. When I asked, 'What becomes of her at the end of this?' I was thinking of the harm you have already done. As a fact, I have ordered my cart to be ready to take her home."

Captain Vyell considered for a few seconds. "Sir," he said, "since plain speech is allowed between us, I consider you a narrow bigot; but, I hasten to add, you are the best man I have met in Port Nassau. By the way—that house on our left—does it by chance belong to Mr. Wapshott?"

"It does."

"I thought so. For a couple of hours past, in the intervals of my reading, I have discovered a family of tall young women peeking at us from behind the windows and a barrier of furniture; and once, it seemed to me, I detected the wattles of your worthy fellow-magistrate. He ought not to strain that neck; you should warn him of the danger."

"It should have warned you, sir, of what mischief you are doing."

"I seem to remember," the Collector mused, "reading the words 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' to-day written on the wall behind you. . . . Why, damn me, sir, for aught you or any of them can tell, I intend to marry this girl! Why not? Go and tell them. Could there (you'll say) be a fairer betrothal? The reputable plight their troth with a single ring around the woman's finger; but here are four rings around the four ankles, and the bar locked. With your leave, which is the more symbolical?"

"You are a reprobate man, Captain Vyell," was the answer, "and I have no relish for your talk. I will only say this, When her punishment is done, my cart shall be ready for her; and you, if you would vindicate an action which—for I'll give you that credit—sprang from a generous impulse, will go your ways and let this child live down her humiliation."

Mr. Trask turned and went his way up the alley, across which the sun made level rays of flame. The Collector sat in thought.

He turned his head, surprised by the sound of a sob. A small child had drawn near—a toddle of four, trailing her wooden doll with its head in the dust—and stood a few paces in front of Ruth Josselin, round-eyed, finger at mouth.

"Steady, my girl. . . . Steady!"

At the murmured warning she braced her body stiffly, and no second sob came. But the tears ran—the first in all her long agony—and small shivers, as light winds play on aspen, chased one another down her throat. Almost you could guess them passing down her flesh beneath the sackcloth, rippling over its torn and purple ridges.

He did not check her weeping. The child—small, innocent cause of it— stood round-eyed, wondering. "She has been naughty. What has she done, to be so naughty?"

Over the maples the town clock slowly told the hour.

They were free. The Collector tossed away the half-smoked tobacco-leaf—his twelfth—drew a long breath, and emitted it with a gay laugh of relief. At the same moment he saw Mr. Trask's bullock-cart approaching down the dappled avenue.

Chapter XII.

THE HUT BY THE BEACH.

"And you'll never hold up your head again! No more will any of us.
The disgrace of it! the disgrace of it!"

Ruth stood in the middle of the wretched room, with her hands hanging slack and her eyes bent wearily upon her mother, who had collapsed upon a block of sawn timber, and sat there, with sack apron cast over her head, rocking her body.

"Hush, ye fool!" said old Josselin, and spat out of window. Mechanically, by habit, his dim eyes swept along the beach by the breakers' edge. "What's the use, any way?" he added.

"We, that always carried ourselves so high, for all our being poor!
It's God's mercy that took your father before he could see this day.
'Twould have broken his sperrit. Your father a Josselin, and me a
Pocock, with lands of my own—if right was law in this world; and now to
be stripped naked and marched through the streets!"

Ruth's eyes met the Collector's. He stood within the doorway, and was regarding her curiously. She did not plead or protest; only, as their eyes met, a flush rose to her cheek, and he guessed rightly that the touch of shame was for her mother, not for herself. The flush deepened as old Josselin turned and said apologetically,—

"You mustn't mind M'ria. She's weak-minded. Always was; but sence her husband was drowned—he was my second son—she've lost whatever wits she had. The gal here was born about that time." Here the old man launched into some obstetrical guesswork, using the plainest words. It embarrassed the Collector; the girl did not so much as wince.

"Poor might be stood," moaned the woman; "but poor and shamed!" Then of a sudden, as though recollecting herself, she arose with an air of mincing gentility. "Ruth," she said, "it's little we can offer the gentleman, but you might get out the bread and cheese, after his being so kind to you."

"Sit down, you dormed fool," commanded her father-in-law. "Here, fetch your seat over to the look-out, an' tell me if that's a log I see floatin'. She's wonderful good at that," he explained, without lowering his voice, "and it'll keep her quiet. It's true, though, what she said about the property. Thousands of acres, if she had her rights—up this side of the Kennebee." He jerked a thumb northwards. "The Pococks bought it off one of the Gorges, gettin' on for a hundred years sence; and by rights, as I say, a seventh share oughter be hers. But lawyers! The law's like a ship's pump: pour enough in for a start, and it'll reward ye with floods. But where's the money to start it?"

The Collector scarcely heard him. His eyes were on Ruth's face. He had walked briskly down from the Town Square to the Bowling Green Inn, refreshed himself, let saddle his horse, and set forth, leaving orders for his coach to follow. At the summit of the hill above Port Nassau he had overtaken the cart with the poor girl lying in it, had checked his pace to ride alongside, and so, disregarding Mr. Trask's counsel, had brought her home. Nay, dismissing the men with a guinea apiece, he had desired them to return to Mr. Trask and report his conduct.

"Listen to me," he said suddenly, checking Old Josselin in full flow. "You say, both of you, that Ruth here will live under disgrace; and I dare say you are right. Why not send her away? Get her out of this."

The woman by the window turned her head with a vague simper. The old man, building a small heap of chips on the hearthstone, distended his cheeks and let out his breath slowly, as though coaxing a fire already kindled.

"All very well—but where? And where's the money to come from? Besides, we can't spare the child; she vittles us. Dorm it, Ruth," he exclaimed, on a sudden recollection, "you don't say you ha'n't brought back the gun!"

"No, grandfather."

"Why? The magistrates would have given it back. It's ruination for us without the gun, and that you might have remembered. Better step over and ask 'em for it to-morrow."

"Must I?" asked the girl slowly.

"'Course you'll have to," said her grandparent. "I can't walk the distance, and that you know.—My eyesight's poor," he explained to the Collector, "and I can't walk, because—" here he stated an organic complaint very frankly. "As for M'ria, she's an eye like a fish-hawk; but you never saw such a born fool with firearms. Well, must heat some water, I reckon, to bathe the poor maid's back."

"First give her food," said the Collector. He stepped forward and himself cut her a large manchet from the loaf the old man produced. She took it from him and ate ravenously, like a young wild animal, tearing at the crust with her white teeth. "They haven't broken your body's health, then," he thought to himself. Aloud he said, "You don't quite take my meaning, Mr. Josselin, and I'll put it to you in a straight offer. Let her come with me to Boston. She shall be put to school there, say for three years; she shall live among folk who will treat her kindly, and teach her at any rate to build up her spirit again and be happy, as she will never be within these miles of Port Nassau; and in return—"

"Ah!" said the old man significantly.

"In return you shall accept from me a decent pension—enough, at any rate, to fend off want. We will not quarrel over the amount, up or down. Or, if you prefer, I will get the lawyers to look into this claim of your daughter-in-law's, and maybe make you an offer for it."

"Ah!" repeated Old Josselin, and nodded. "Taken your eye, has she? Oh, I'm not blamin' your lordship! Flesh will after flesh, and—you can believe it or not—I was all for the women in my time." He chuckled, and had added some gross particulars before the younger man could check him. Yet the old fellow was so naif and direct that his speech left no evil taste. He talked as one might of farm stock. "But we're decent folk, we Josselins. It's hard to starve and be decent too, and times enough I've been sorry for it; but decent we are."

The Collector frowned. "Mr. Josselin," he answered, "I am offering you to take your granddaughter away and have her educated. What that will make of her I neither can tell you nor have I means of guessing; but this I will undertake, and give you my word of honour for it: in three years' time she shall come back to you in all honesty, unharmed by me or by any one. By that time she will be a woman grown, able to decide as a woman; but she shall come to you, nevertheless."

The old man fumbled with a finger, scraping together the flakes of touchwood in a tinder-box.

"D'ye hear, M'ria? His Honour wants our Ruth to go along with him."

The Collector glanced at the girl's face. Years after, and a hundred times, he recalled the look with which she turned towards her mother. At the same instant her mother faced about with a vacuous silly smile.

"Eh?"

"To larn to be a lady," Old Josselin explained, raising his voice as though she were deaf.

"That would be a fine thing," she answered mincingly, and returned her gaze to the window and the line of shore.

Chapter XIII.

RUTH SETS OUT.

Manasseh had wrapped Master Dicky up warm in a couple of rugs, and spread a third about his feet. In the ample state seat of the coach the child reclined as easily as in a bed. He began to doze while the vehicle yet jolted over the road crossing the headland; and when it gained the track, and the wheels rolled smoothly on the hard sand, the motion slid him deep into slumber.

He came out of it with a start and a catch of the breath, and for a full half-minute lay with all his senses numbed, not so much scared as bewildered. In his dreams he had been at home in Boston, and he searched his little brain, wondering why he was awake, and if he should call for Miss Quiney (who slept always within hail, in a small bedroom); and why, when the night-nursery window lay to the left of his bed, strange lights should be flashing on his right, where the picture of King William landing at Torbay hung over his washstand.

The lights moved to and fro, then they were quenched, and all was dark about him. But he heard Manasseh's voice, some way off, in the darkness, and the sound of it brought him to his bearings. He was in the coach, he remembered; and realising this, he was instantly glad—for he was a plucky child—that he had not called out to summon Miss Quiney.

Had there been an accident? At any rate he was not hurt. His father had ridden on ahead, and would reach home many hours in advance. The boy had learnt this from Manasseh. He reasoned that, if an accident had happened, his father would not hear of it—would be riding forward, further and further into the night. He wondered how Manasseh and the grooms would manage without his father, who always gave the orders and was never at a loss.

He sat up, peering out into the night. He was still peering thus, building hasty wild guesses, when again a light showed, waving as it drew nearer. It came close; it was one of the coach-lamps, and blazed full into his eyes through the window. The door opened, letting in the roar of the beach and smiting his small nostrils with sea-brine, that with one breath purged away the stuffy scent of leather.

Manasseh was handing some one into the coach.

"De child—Mas' Richard—if you'll tak' care, miss. He's fas' asleep, prob'ly."

"But I'm not," said Dicky, sitting bolt upright and gathering his rugs about him. "Who is it?"

Manasseh perhaps did not hear. He made no reply, at any rate, but turned the lamp full on Ruth Josselin as she sank back against the cushions on Dicky's right.

"You will find plenty rugs, miss."

He shut the door. Dicky, holding his breath, heard him replace the lamp in its socket, and felt the soft tilt of his great weight as he climbed to the perch behind.

"R—right away!"

There was a tug, and the great coach rolled forward. In the darkness
Dicky caught the sound of a smothered sob.

"Who are you?" he asked. There was no response, and after a moment he added, "I know. You are the girl who put out the fire. I like you."

He was very sleepy. He wondered why she did not answer; but, his childish instinct assuring him that she was a friend, in his somnolence he felt nothing other than trust in her. He nestled close in his rugs and reached out an arm.

It rubbed across the weals on Ruth's back, and was torture. She clenched her teeth, while tears—tears of physical anguish, irrepressible—over-brimmed her lashes and fell uncounted in the darkness.

"You are crying. Why? I like you." The child's voice trailed off into dream.

"Closer!" whispered Ruth, and would have forced the embrace upon her pain; but it relaxed. Dicky's head fell sideways, and rested, angled between the cushions and her shoulder.

She sat wide-eyed, staring into folds of darkness, while the coach rolled forward smoothly towards the dawn.

BOOK II.

PROBATION.

Chapter I.

AFTER TWO YEARS.

"Come down and play!"

Ruth, looking down from the open lattice, smiled and shook her head.
"I must not; I'm doing my lessons."

"Must not!" mimicked Master Dick. "You're getting stupider and stupider, living up here. If you don't look out, one of these days you'll turn into an old maid—just like Miss Quiney."

"Hs-s-sh! She's downstairs somewhere."

"I don't care if she hears." Dicky ran his eyes defiantly along the line of ground-floor windows under the verandah, then upturned his face again. "After coming all this way on purpose to play with you," he protested.

"You have made yourself dreadfully hot."

"I am hot," the boy confessed. "I gave Piggy the slip at the foot of the hill, and I've run every step of the way."

"Is he here?" Ruth glanced nervously toward a clump of elms around which the path from the entrance-gate curved into view. "But you oughtn't to call Mr. Silk 'Piggy,' you know. It—it's ungentlemanly."

"Why, I took the name from you! You said yourself, one day, that he was a pig; and so he is. He has piggy eyes, and he eats too much, and there's something about the back of his neck you must have noticed."

"It's cruel of you, Dicky, to remember and cast up what I said when I knew no better. You know how hard I am learning: in the beginning you helped me to learn."

"Did I?" mused Dicky. "Then I wish I hadn't, if you're going to grow up and treat me like this. Oh, very well," he added stoutly after a pause, "then I'm learning too, learning to be a sailor; and it'll be first-rate practice to climb aloft to you, over the verandah. You don't mind my spitting on my hands? It's a way they have in the Navy."

"Dicky, don't be foolish! Think of Miss Quiney's roses." Finding him inexorable, Ruth began to parley. "I don't want to see Mr. Silk. But if I come down to you, it will not be to play. We'll creep off to the Well, or somewhere out of hail, and there you must let me read—or perhaps I'll read aloud to you. Promise?"

"What're you reading?"

"The Bible."

Dicky pulled a face. "Well, the Bible's English, anyway," he said resignedly. The sound of a foreign tongue always made him feel pugnacious, and it was ever a question with him how, as a gentleman, to treat a dead language. Death was respectable, but had its own obligations; obligations which Greek and Latin somehow ignored.

The house, known as Sabines, stood high on the slope of the midmost of Boston's three hills, in five acres of ground well set with elms. Captain Vyell had purchased the site some five years before, and had built himself a retreat away from the traffic that surged about his official residence by the waterside. Of its raucous noises very few— the rattle of a hawser maybe, or a boatswain's whistle, or the yells of some stentorian pilot—reached to penetrate the belt of elms surrounding the house and its green garth; but the Collector had pierced this woodland with bold vistas through which the eye overlooked Boston harbour with its moving panorama of vessels, the old fort then standing where now stands the Navy Yard, and the broad waters of the Charles sweeping out to the Bay.

For eighteen months he, the master of this demesne, had not set foot within its front gate; not once since the day when on a sudden resolution he had installed Ruth Josselin here, under ward of Miss Quiney, to be visited and instructed in theology, the arts, and the sciences, by such teachers as that unparagoned spinster might, with his approval, select. In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss Quiney's taste in teachers was of the austerest. What nutriment (one might well have asked) could a young mind extract from the husks of doctrine and of grammar purveyed to Ruth by the Reverend Malachi Hichens, her tutor in the Holy Scriptures and in the languages of Greece and Rome?

The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin. Mr. Hichens might be dry—inhumanly dry—and his methods repellent; but there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger, wine for her thirst. So too the harpsichord held music, though Miss Quiney's touch upon it was formal and lifeless. . . . In these eighteen months Ruth Josselin had been learning eagerly, teaching herself in a hundred ways and by devices of which she wist not. Yet always she was conscious of the final purpose of this preparation; nay, it possessed her, mastered her. For whatever fate her lord designed her, she would be worthy of it.

He never came. For eighteen months she had not seen him. Was it carelessly or in delicacy that he withheld his face? Or peradventure in displeasure? Her heart would stand still at times, and her face pale with the fear of it. She could not bethink her of having displeased him; but it might well be that he repented of his vast condescension. Almost without notice, and without any reason given, he had deported her to this house on the hill. . . . Yet, if he repented, why did he continue to wrap her around with kindness? Why had she these good clothes, and food and drink, servants to wait on her, tutors to teach her—everything, in short, but liberty and young companions and his presence that most of all she desired and dreaded?

On the slope to the south-west of the house, in a dingle well screened with willow and hickory, a stream of water gushed from the living rock and had been channelled downhill over a stairway of flat boulders, so that it dropped in a series of miniature cascades before shooting out of sight over the top of a ferny hollow. The spot was a favourite one with Dicky, for between the pendent willow boughs, as through a frame, it overlooked the shipping and the broad bosom of the Charles. Ruth and he stole away to it, unperceived of Miss Quiney; to a nook close beside the spray of the fall, where on a boulder the girl could sit and read while Dick wedged his back into a cushion of moss, somewhat higher up the slope, and recumbent settled himself so as to bring (luxurious young dog!) her face in profile between him and the shining distance.

She had stipulated for silence while she read her lesson over; but he at once began to beg off.

"If you won't let me talk," he grumbled, "the least you can do is to read aloud."

"But it's the Bible," she objected.

"Oh, well, I don't mind. Only choose something interesting. David and
Goliath, or that shipwreck in the Acts."

"You don't seem to understand that this is a lesson, and I must read what Mr. Hichens sets. To-day it's about Hagar and Ishmael."

"I seem to forget about them; but fire away, and we'll hope there's a story in it."

Ruth began to read: "And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking her. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman. . ."

She read on. Before she ended Dicky had raised himself to a sitting posture. "The whole business was a dirty shame," he declared. "This Ishmael was his own son, eh? Then why should he cast out one son more than another?"

"There's a long explanation in the New Testament," said Ruth. "It's by St. Paul; and I dare say that Mr. Hichens too, if he sees anything difficult in it, will say that Ishmael stands for the bond and Isaac for the free, and Abraham had to do it, or the teaching wouldn't come right."

"He can't make out it was fair; nor St. Paul can't neither, not if you read it to him like you did to me," asserted Dicky.

"But I shall not," answered Ruth after a pause, "and it was rather clever of you to guess."

"Why not?"

"Because it would shock him. I used to find the Bible just as dull as he makes it out: but one day I heard Mr. Langton standing up for it. Mr. Langton said it was the finest book in the world and the most fascinating, if only you read it in the proper way; and the proper way, he said, is to forget all about its being divided into verses and just take it like any other book. I tried that, and it makes all the difference."

"You mean to say you like it?" asked Dicky, incredulous.

"I love it. I can't get away from the people in it. They are so splendid, one moment; and, the next, they are just too mean and petty for words; and the queer part of it is, they never see. They tell falsehoods, and they cheat, and the things they do to get into Palestine are simply disgusting—even if they had the shadow of a right there, which they haven't."

"But the land was promised to them."

She had a mind to criticise that promise, but checked her lips.
He was a child, and she would do no violence to the child's mind.

Getting no answer, he considered for a while, and harked back. "But I don't see," he began, and halted, casting about to express himself. "I don't see why, if you read it like that to yourself, you should read it differently to old Hichens. That's a sort of pretending, you know."

She turned her eyes on him, and they were straight and honest, as always. "Oh," said she, "you are a man, of course!"

Master Dicky blushed with pleasure.

"Men," she went on, "can go the straight way to get what they wish. The way is usually hard—it ought to be hard if the man is worth anything—but it is always quite straight and simple, else it is wrong. Now women have to win through men; which means that they must go round about."

"But old Hichens?"

To herself she might have answered, "He only is allowed to me here.
On whom else can I practise to please? But, alas! I practise for a
master who never comes!" Aloud she said, "You are excited to-day,
Dicky. You have something to tell me."

"I should think I had!"

"What is it?"

"It's about Uncle Harry. Dad showed me a letter from him to-day, and he's fought a splendid action down off Grand Bahama. Oh, you must hear! It seems he'd been beating about in his frigate for close on three months—on and off the islands on the look-out for those Spanish fellows that snap up our fruit-ships. Well, the water on board was beginning to smell; so he ran in through the nor'-west entrance of Providence Channel, anchored just inside, and sent his casks ashore to be refilled. They'd taken in the fresh stock, and the Venus was weighing for sea again almost before the last boatload came alongside.—Can't you see her, the beauty! One anchor lifted, t'other chain shortened in, tops'ls and t'gallants'ls cast off, ready to cant her at the right moment—"

"Is that how they do it?"

"Of course it is. Well just then Uncle Harry spied a boat beating in through the entrance. He had passed her outside two days before—one of those small open craft that dodge about groping for sponges—splendid naked fellows, the crews are. She had put about and run back in search of him, and her news was of a Spanish guarda-costa making down towards Havana with three prizes. Think of it! Uncle Harry was off and after them like a greyhound, and at sunrise next morning he sighted them in a bunch. He had the wind of them and the legs of them; there isn't a speedier frigate afloat than the Venus—although, he says, she was getting foul with weed: and after being chased for a couple of hours the Spaniard and two of the prizes hauled up and showed fight. Now for it! . . . He ran past the guarda-costa, drawing her fire, but no great harm done; shot up under the sterns of the two prizes, that were lying not two hundred yards apart; and raked 'em with half-a-broadside apiece—no time, you see, to reload between. It pretty well cleaned every Spaniard off their decks—Why are you putting your hands to your ears!"

"Go on," said Ruth withdrawing them.

"By this, of course, he had lost way and given the guarda-costa the wind of him. But she couldn't reach the Venus for twenty minutes and more, because of the prizes lying helpless right in her way, and in half that time Uncle Harry had filled sail again and was manoeuvring out of danger. Bit by bit he worked around her for the wind'ard berth, got it, bore down again and hammered her for close upon three hours. She fought, he says, like a rat in a sink, and when at last she pulled down her colours the two prizes had patched up somehow and were well off for Havana after the third, that had showed no fight from the beginning. Quick as lightning he gets his prisoners on board, heads off on the new chase, and by sundown has taken the prizes all three—the third one a timber-ship, full of mahogany . . . That wasn't the end of his luck, either; for the captain of the guarda-costa turned out to be a blackguard that two years ago took a British captain prisoner and cut off his ears, which accounts for his fighting so hard. 'Didn't want to meet me if he could help it,' writes Uncle Harry, and says the man wouldn't haul down the flag till his crew had tied him up with ropes."

"What happened to him?"

"Uncle Harry shipped him off to England. This was from Carolina, where he sailed in with all the four vessels in convoy. And now, guess! He has refitted there, and is sailing around for Boston, and papa has promised to ask him to take me for a cruise, to see if he can make a sailor of me!"

"But that won't be for years."

"Oh yes, it will. You can join the Navy at any age. They ship you on as a cabin-boy, or sometimes as the Captain's servant; and papa says that for the first cruise Uncle Harry's wife will look after me."

"But"—Ruth opened beautiful eyes of astonishment. "Your Uncle Harry is not married? Why, more than once you have told me that you would never take a wife when you grew up, but be like your uncle and live only for sailing a ship and fighting."

"He is, though. It happened at Carolina, whilst the Venus was refitting; and I believe her father is Governor there, or something of the sort, but I didn't read that part of the letter very carefully. There was a lot of silly talk in it, quite different from the fighting. I remember, though, he said he was coming around here for his honeymoon; and I'm glad, on the whole."

"On the whole? When you've dreamed, all this while, of seeing your uncle and growing up to be like him!"

"I mean that on the whole I'm glad he is married. It—it shows the two things can go together after all; and, Ruth—"

She turned in some wonderment as his voice faltered, and wondered more at sight of his young face. It was crimson.

"No, please! I want you not to look," he entreated. "I want you to turn your face away and listen . . . Ruth," he blurted, "I love you better than anybody in the whole world!"

"Dear Dicky!"

"—and I think you're the loveliest person that ever was—besides being the best."

"It's lovely of you, at any rate, to think so." Ruth, forgetting his command, turned her eyes again on Dicky, and they were dewy. For indeed she loved him and his boyish chivalrous ways. Had he not been her friend from the first, taking her in perfect trust, and in the hour that had branded her and in her dreams seared her yet? Often, yet, in the mid-watches of the night she started out of sleep and lay quivering along her exquisite body from head to heel, while the awful writing awoke and crawled and ate again, etching itself upon her flesh.

"But—but it made me miserable!" choked Dicky.

"Miserable! Why?"

"Because I wanted to grow up and marry you," he managed to say defiantly. "And the two things didn't seem to fit at all. I couldn't make them fit. But of course," he went on in a cheerfuller voice, the worst of his confession over, "if Uncle Harry can be married, why shouldn't we?"

She bent her head low over the book. Calf-love is absurd, but so honest, so serious; and like all other sweet natural foolishness should be sacred to the pure of heart.

"I ought to tell you something though," he went on gravely and hesitated.

"Yes, Dicky! What is it?"

"Well, I don't quite know what it means, and I don't like to ask any one else. Perhaps you can tell me. . . . I wouldn't ask it if it weren't that I'd hate to take you in; or if I could find out any other way."

"But what is it, dear?"

"Something against me. I can't tell what, though I've looked at myself again and again in the glass, trying." He met her eyes bravely, with an effort. "Ruth, dear—what is a bastard?"

Ruth sat still. Her palms were folded, one upon another, over the book on her knees.

"But what is it?" he pleaded.

"It means," she said quietly, "a child whose father and mother are not married—not properly married."

A pause followed—a long pause—and the tumbling cascade sounded louder and louder in Ruth's ears, while Dicky considered.

"Do you think," he asked at length "that papa was not properly married to my mother?"

"No, dear—no. And even if that were so, what difference could it make to my loving you?"

"It wouldn't make any! Sure?"

"Sure."

"But it might make a difference to papa," he persisted, "if ever papa had another child—like Abraham, you know—" Here he jumped to his feet, for she had risen of a sudden. "Why, what is the matter?"

She held out a hand. There were many dragon-flies by the fall, and for the moment he guessed that one of them had stung her.

"Dicky," she said. "Whatever happens, you and I will be friends always."

"Always," he echoed, taking her hand and ready to search for the mark of the sting. But her eyes were fastened on the water bubbling from the well head.

A branch creaked aloft, and to the right of the well head the hickory bushes rustled and parted.

"So here are the truants!" exclaimed a voice. "Good-morning, Miss
Josselin!"

Chapter II.

MR. SILK.

The Reverend Nahum Silk, B.A., sometime of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, had first arrived in America as a missioner seeking a sphere of labour in General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. He was then (1733-4) a young man, newly admitted to priest's orders, and undergoing what he took to be a crisis of the soul. Sensual natures, such as his, not uncommonly suffer in youth a combustion of religious sentiment. The fervour is short-lived, the flame is expelled by its own blast, and leaves a house swept and garnished, inviting devils.

For the hard fare of Georgia he soon began to seek consolations, and early in the second year of his ministry a sufficiently gross scandal tumbled him out of the little colony. Lacking the grit to return to England and face out his relatives' displeasure, he had drifted northwards to Massachusetts, and there had picked up with a slant of luck. A number of godly and well-to-do citizens of Boston had recently banded themselves into an association for supplying religious opportunities to the seamen frequenting the port, and to the Committee Mr. Silk commended himself by a hail-fellow manner and a shrewdness of speech which, since it showed through a coat of unction, might be supposed to mean shrewdness in grain. Cunning indeed the man could be, for his short ends; but his shrewdness began and ended in a trick of talking, and in the conduct of life he trimmed sail to his appetites.

His business of missioner (or, as he jocosely put it, Chaplain of the Fleet) soon brought him to the notice of Captain Vyell, Collector of Customs, with whom by the same trick of speech (slightly adapted) he managed to ingratiate himself, scenting the flesh-pots. For he belonged to the tribe to whom a patron never comes amiss. Captain Vyell was amused by the man; knew him for a sycophant; but tolerated him at table and promoted him (in Batty Langton's phrase) to be his trencher chaplain. He and Langton took an easy malicious delight, over their wine, in shocking Mr. Silk with their free thought and seeing how "the dog swallowed it."

The dog swallowed his dirty puddings very cleverly, and with just so much show of protest as he felt to be due to his Orders. He had the accent of an English gentleman and enough of the manner to pass muster. But the Collector erred when he said that "Silk was only a beast in his cups," and he erred with a carelessness well-nigh wicked when he made the man Dicky's tutor.

This step had coincided with the relegation of Ruth and Miss Quiney to Sabines; but whether by chance or of purpose no one but the Collector could tell. Of his intentions toward the girl he said nothing, even to Batty Langton. Very likely they were not clear to himself. He knew well enough how fast and far gossip travelled in New England; and doubted not at all that his adventure at Port Nassau had within a few days been whispered and canvassed throughout Boston. His own grooms, no doubt, had talked. But he could take a scornful amusement in baffling speculation while he made up his own mind. In one particular only he had been prompt—in propitiating Miss Quiney. On reaching home, some hours ahead of the girl, he had summoned Miss Quiney to his library and told her the whole story. The interview on her part had been exclamatory and tearful; but the good lady, with all her absurdities, was a Christian. She was a woman too, and delighted to serve an overmastering will. She had left him with a promise to lay her conscience in prayer before the Lord; and, next morning, Ruth's beauty had done the rest.

"Good-morning, Miss Josselin!" Ruth started and glanced up the slope with a shiver. The voice of Mr. Silk always curdled her flesh.

"La! la!" went on Mr. Silk, nodding down admiration. "What a group to startle!—Cupid extracting a thorn from the hand of Venus—or (shall we say?) the Love god, having wounded his mother in sport, kisses the scratch to make it well. Ha, ha!"

"Shall I continue, sir?" said Ruth, recovering herself. "The pair are surprised by a satyr who crept down to the spring to bathe his aching head—"

"Hard on me, as usual!" Mr. Silk protested, climbing down the slope. "But 'tis the privilege of beauty to be cruel. As it happens, I drank moderately last night, and I come with a message from the Diana of these groves. Miss Quiney wishes to communicate to you some news I have had the honour to bring in a letter from Captain Vyell—or, as we must now call him, Sir Oliver."

"Sir Oliver?" echoed Ruth, not understanding at all.

"The Fish-hawk arrived in harbour this morning with the English mail-bags; and the Collector has letters informing him that his uncle, Sir Thomas Vyell, is dead after a short illness—the cause, jail fever, contracted while serving at Launceston, in Cornwall, on the Grand Jury."

"Captain Vyell succeeds?"

"To the title and, I believe, to very considerable estates. His uncle leaves no male child."

"Dicky had not told me of this."

"—Because," explained the boy, "I didn't know what it meant, and I don't know now. Papa told me this morning that his uncle was dead, home in England; but I'd never heard of him, and it slipped out of my mind. Can titles, as you call them, be passed on like that? And if papa died, should I get one? Or would it go to Uncle Harry?"

"It would go to your uncle," said Mr. Silk. "Now run along to the house and tell Miss Quiney that I have found the pair of you. She was getting anxious."

Dicky hesitated. He knew that Ruth had a horror of his tutor.

"Yes, run," she commanded, reading his glance. "We follow at once."

The boy scrambled up the slope. Mr. Silk looked after him and chuckled.

"Dicky don't know yet that there are two sides to a blanket."

Getting no answer—for she had turned and was stooping to pick up her book—he went on, "Vyell had a letter, among others, from the widow, Lady Caroline; and that, between ourselves, is the cause of my errand. She writes that she is taking a trip across here, to restore her nerves, and is bringing her daughter for company. The daughter, so near as I gather, is of an age near-about Vyell's. See?"

"I am afraid I do not." Ruth had recovered her book and her composure.
A rose-flush showed yet on either cheek, but it lay not within Mr.
Silk's competence to read so delicate a signal. "Will you explain?"

"Well"—he leered—"it did occur to me there might be some cleverness in the lady's search after consolation. Her daughter and our Collector being cousins—eh? At any rate, that's her first thought; to bring the girl—woman, if you prefer it—over and renew acquaintance with the heir. Must be excused if I misjudge her. Set it down to zeal for you, Miss Josselin."

"Willingly, Mr. Silk—if your zeal for me did not outrun my understanding."

"Yet you're clever. But you won't persuade me you don't see the difficulty. . . . Er—how shall I put it? The Collector—we'll have to get used to calling him Sir Oliver—is as cool under fire as any man this side of the Atlantic; fire of criticism, I mean. There's a limit though. He despises Colonial opinion—that's his pose; takes pride in despising it, encouraged by Langton. But England? his family?—that's another matter. An aunt—and that aunt an earl's daughter—If you'll believe me, Miss Josselin, I'm a man of family and know the sort. They're incredible. And the younger lady, if I may remind you, called Diana; which—er—may warn us that she, too, is particular about these things." Here Mr. Silk, having at length found his retort upon her similitude of the satyr, licked his lips.

Ruth drew up and stood tapping her foot. "May I beg to be told exactly what has happened, sir?"

"What has happened? What has happened is that Vyell is placing Sabines at the disposal of his aunt and cousin for so long as they may honour Boston with their presence. He sends the Quiney word to pack and hold herself in readiness for a flitting. Whither? I cannot say; nor can he yet have found the temporary nest for you. But doubtless you will hear in due course. May I offer you my arm?"

"I thank you, no. Indeed we will part here, unless you have further business in the house—and I gather that your errand there is discharged. . . . One question—Captain Vyell sent his message by a letter, which Miss Quiney no doubt will show to me. Did he further commission you with a verbal one? You had better," she added quietly, "be particular about telling me the truth; for I may question him, and for a discovered falsehood he is capable of beating you."

"What I have said," stammered the clergyman, "was—er—entirely on my own responsibility. I—I conceived you would find it sympathetic— helpful perhaps. Believe me, Miss Josselin, I have considerable feeling for you and your—er—position."

"I thank you." She dismissed him with a gentle curtsy. "I feel almost sure you have been doing your best."

Chapter III.

MR. HICHENS.

She turned and walked slowly back to the house. Once within the front door and out of his sight, she was tempted to rush across the hall and up the stairs to her own room. She was indeed gathering up her skirts for the run, when in the hall she almost collided with the Reverend Malachi Hichens, who stood there with his nose buried in a vase of roses, while behind his back his hands interwove themselves and pulled each at the other's bony knuckles.

"Ah!" He faced about with a stiff bow, and a glance up at the tall clock. "You are late this morning, Miss Josselin. But I dare say my good brother Silk has been detaining you in talk?"

"On the contrary," answered Ruth, "his talk has rather hastened me than not."

They entered the library. "Miss Quiney tells me," he said, "that our studies are to suffer a brief interruption; that you are about to take a country holiday. You anticipate it with delight, I doubt not?"

"Have I been, then, so listless a scholar?" she asked, smiling.

"No," he answered. "I have never looked on you as eager for praise, or I should have told you that your progress—in Greek particularly—has been exceptional; for a young lady, I might almost say, abnormal."

"I am grateful to you at any rate for saying it now. It happens that just now I wanted something to give me back a little self-respect."

"But I do not suppose you so abnormal as, at your age, to undervalue a holiday," he continued. "It is only we elders who live haunted by the words 'Work while ye have the light.' If youth extract any moral from the brevity of life it is rather the pagan warning, Collige rosas."

Her eyes rested on him, still smiling, but behind her smile she was wondering. Did he—this dry, sallow old man, with the knock-knees and ungainly frame, the soiled bands, the black suit, threadbare, hideous in cut, hideous in itself (Ruth had a child's horror of black)—did he speak thus out of knowledge, or was he but using phrases of convention? Ruth feared and distrusted all religious folk—clergymen above all; yet instinct had told her at the first that Mr. Hichens was honest, even good in an unlovely fashion; and by many small daily tests she had proved this. Was it possible that Mr. Hichens had ever gathered roses in his youth? Was it possible that, expecting Heaven and professing a spiritual joy in redemption, a man could symbolise his soul's state by wearing these dingy weeds? Had he no sense of congruity, or was all religion so false in grain that it perverted not only the believer's judgment but his very senses, turning white into black for him, and making beauty and ugliness change places?

"For my part," said Mr. Hichens wistfully, "I regret the interruption; for I had even played with the thought of teaching you some Hebrew." He paused and sighed. "But doubtless the Almighty denies us these small pleasures for our good. . . . Shall we begin with our repetition? I forget the number of the Psalm?"

"The forty-fifth," said Ruth, finding the place and handing him the book. "My heart is inditing of a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made unto the king." . . . She recited the opening lines very quietly, but her voice lifted at the third verse. Beautiful words always affected her poignantly, but the language of the Bible more poignantly than any other, because her own unforgettable injury had been derived from it and sanctioned by it, and because at the base of things our enemies in this world are dearer to us than friends. They cling closer.

Yet,—and paradox though it be—the Bible was the more alive to her because, on Mr. Langton's hint, she had taken it like any other book, ignoring the Genevan division of verses and the sophisticated chapter headings. Thus studied, it had revenged itself by taking possession of her. It held all the fascination of the East, and little by little unlocked it—Abraham at his tent door, Rebekah by the fountain, her own namesake Ruth in the dim threshing-floor of Boaz, King Saul wrestling with his dark hour, the last loathly years of David, Jezebel at the window, Job on his dung-heap, Athaliah murdering the seed royal, and again Athaliah dragged forth by the stable-way and calling Treason! Treason! . . . Bedouins with strings of camels, scent of camels by the city gate, clashing of distant cymbals, hush of fear—plot and counterplot in the apartments of the women—outcries, lusts, hates— blood on the temple steps—blood oozing, welling across the gold—blood caking in spots upon illimitable desert sands—watchmen by the wall—in the dark streets a woman with bleeding back and feet seeking and calling, "I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved—"

"Hearken, O daughter, and consider, incline thine ear"—Ruth's voice swelled up on a full note: "forget also thine own people and thy father's house."

"So shall the King have pleasure in thy beauty: for he is thy lord, and worship thou him."

"Excuse me—'for he is thy Lord God,'" corrected Mr. Hichens. . . .
"We are taking the Prayer Book's version."

"I changed to the Bible version on purpose," Ruth confessed; "and 'lord' ought to have a small 'l'. The Prayer Book makes nonsense of it. They are bringing in the bride, the princess, to her lord. She is all glorious within, her clothing is of wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework: the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company—"

"The Hebrew," said Mr. Hichens, blinking over his own text which he had hastily consulted, "would seem to bear you out, or at least to leave the question open. But, after all, it matters little, since, as the chapter heading explains in the Authorized Version, the supposed bride is the Church, and the bridegroom, therefore, necessarily Our Lord."

"Do you think that, or anything like that, was in the mind of the man who wrote it?" asked Ruth, rebellious. "The title says, 'To the Chief Musician upon Shoshannim'—whatever that may mean."

"It means that it was to be sung to a tune called Shoshannim or Lilies— doubtless a well-known one."

"It has a beautiful name, then; and he calls it too 'Maschil, A song of
Loves.'"

"Historically no doubt you are right," agreed Mr. Hichens. "The song is undoubtedly later than David, and was written as a Prothalamion for a royal bride. It is, as you say, exceedingly beautiful; but perhaps we had best confine our attention to its allegorical side. You probably do not guess who the bride was?"

"No," Ruth admitted. "Who was she?"

"It is generally admitted, I believe, to have been written as a bridal hymn for Queen Jezebel."

"O—oh!" Ruth bit her lip, but had to laugh in spite of herself.

Chapter IV.

VASHTI.

The first bad suggestion almost certainly came from Mr. Silk. Two or three of the company afterwards put their heads together and, comparing recollections, agreed that either Silk or Manley had started it. Beyond the alternative they could not trace it.

But the whole table, they admitted, had been to blame, and pretty damnably. To be sure they were drunk, every man Jack of them, the Collector included. The Collector, indolent by nature but capable of long stretches of work at a pinch, had been at his desk since six o'clock in the morning. The news brought by the Fish-hawk had reached him at five; and after bathing, dressing, and drinking his chocolate, he had started to write, and had been writing letters all day. The most of these were lengthy, addressed to England, to his relatives, his London lawyers, the steward at Carwithiel. . . . The Surveyor and Deputy-Collector could deal—as they usually did—with the official correspondence of the Custom House; his own Secretary had the light task of penning a score of invitations to dinner; but these letters of condolence and private business must be written by his own hand, as also a note to Governor Shirley formally announcing his accession and new title.

The Collector dined at five. He laid down his pen at four, having written for ten hours almost at a stretch, declining all food—for he hated to mix up work with eating and drinking. Before dressing for dinner he refreshed himself with another bath; but he came to table with a jaded brain and a stomach fasting beyond appetite for food; and the wine was champagne.

Miss Quiney and Ruth Josselin, seated that evening in the drawing-room at Sabines, were startled at eight o'clock or thereabouts by a knocking on the front door. Miss Quiney looked up from her tambour-work, with hand and needle suspended in mid-air, and gazed across at Ruth, who, seated at the harpsichord, had been singing softly—murmuring rather—the notes of Ben Jonson's Charis her Triumph—

"Have you seen but a bright Lillie grow
Before rude hands have touch'd it?"—

—but desisted at the noise and slewed her body half around, letting her fingers rest on the keys.

"Who in the world—at this hour?" demanded Miss Quiney.

A serving-maid ushered in Manasseh.

The tall black halted a little within the doorway, saluted and stood grinning respectfully, his white teeth gleaming in the candle-light.

"Yo' pardon, ladies. His Honah sends to say he entertainin' to-night. Plenty people drink his Honah's health an' long life to Sir Olivah Vyell. He wish pertick'ly Mis' Josselin drink it. He tol' me run, get out sedan-chair an' fetch Mis' Josselin along; fetch her back soon as she likes. Chairmen at de door dis moment, waitin'. I mak' 'em run."

Ruth stood up. Her hand went to the edge of her bodice open below the throat.

"Must I?" she asked, turning from Manasseh to Miss Quiney. Her voice was tense.

"I—I think so, dear," Miss Quiney answered after a pause. "It is a command, almost; and to-night naturally Captain Vyell—Sir Oliver—has a claim on our congratulations."

"You tell me to go? . . . Oh! but let me be sure you know what you are advising." She faced the negro again. "What guests is Sir Oliver entertaining?"

Manasseh enumerated a dozen.

"All gentlemen! So, you see!"

"Captain—Sir Oliver (bless me, how I forget! ) has an aversion from ladies' society—Boston ladies. . . . It is not for me to criticise, but the distaste is well known."

"And the gentlemen, Manasseh—they will have taken a great deal of wine by now?"

Manasseh spread out his hands, and again his teeth gleamed. "To be sho', Mis' Josselin; it is not ebery day in the yeah dat Cap'n Vyell become Sir Olivah—"

"I did not ask you," interrupted Ruth coldly, "to excuse your errand.
. . . And now, Tatty dear, do you still bid me to go?"

"On the contrary, I forbid it."

Ruth stepped close to the little lady. Said she, standing straight before her and looking down, "It cost you some courage to say that."

"It may cost me more to-morrow; but I am not afraid."

"My brave Tatty! But the courage is thrown away, for I am going."

"You do not mean this?"

"I do mean it. My master sends for me. You know what duty I owe him."

"He is just. He will thank you to-morrow that you disobeyed."

"I shall not disobey."

Little Miss Quiney, looking up into her ward's eyes, argued this point no further. "Very well," said she. "Then I go too." She closed her mouth firmly, squaring her jaw.

"But in the sedan there is room for one only."

"Then I go first," said Miss Quiney, "and the chair shall return for you. That," she went on, falling back upon her usual pedantic speech, "presents no difficulty whatever to me. What I wear does not matter— the gentlemen will not regard it. But you must dress in what you have of the best. It—it will assist you. Being without experience, you probably have no notion how dress assists one's self-respect."

"I think I have some little notion," Ruth assured her demurely.

"And while the chair is taking me and returning, you will have good time to dress. On no account are you to hurry. . . . It is essential that at no point—at no point, dear—you allow yourself to be hurried, or to show any trace of hurry."

Ruth nodded slowly. "Yes, Tatty. I understand. But, little lioness that you are, do you? You will be alone, and for some time with these—with these—"

"I have never mentioned it to a living soul before," said Miss Quiney, dismissing Manasseh with a wave of the hand and closing the door upon him; "but I had an eldest brother—in the Massachusetts militia—who, not to put too fine a point on it, was sadly addicted to the bottle. It shortened his days. . . . A bright young genius, of which we hoped much, and (I fear me) not all unselfishly, for our family was impoverished. But he went astray. Towards the end he would bring home his boon companions—I will say this for poor dear George, that his footsteps, at their unsteadiest, ever tended homeward; he never affected low haunts—and it fell to me as the eldest daughter of the house to keep his hospitality within bounds—"

"Dear Tatty!" Ruth stooped and kissed the plain little face, cutting short the narrative. It was strange to note how these two of diverse ages—between whom for the length of their acquaintance no dispute of mastery had arisen—now suddenly and in quick alternation, out of pure love, asserted will against will. "You shall tell me to-morrow. (I always knew that your meekness and weakness were only pretence.) But just now we must hurry."

"Hurry, as I must repeat," answered Miss Quiney primly, smoothing down the front of her creased grey satin skirt, "is—will be—our capital mistake. For me, I need in this weather but an additional shawl. I am ready. . . . Go to your room . . . and let me enjoin a certain deliberation even in crossing the hall. Manasseh is there, and before servants—even a negro—The white brocade if I may advise; it is fresher than the rose-coloured silk—and the hair combed a trifle higher off the brows. That, with the brocade, will correct your girlishness somewhat. Brocades are for dignity, and it is dignity we chiefly need to-night. . . . Shall I send Selina to you? No? Well, she would be persuading you to some new twist or experiment with your hair, and you are better without her. Also I shall want a last word with you when I have fetched my cloak, and Selina is better out of the way."

Miss Quiney's last word was a curious one. It took the form of a pearl necklace, her one possession of value, last surviving heirloom of the Quineys, of whom she was the last surviving descendant: her last tangible evidence, too, of those bygone better days. She never wore it, and it never saw the light save when she unlocked the worn jewel-case to make sure that her treasure had not been stolen.

She entered Ruth's room with it furtively. Despite her injunction against hurry, the girl had already indued the white brocade and stood before the mirror conning herself. She wore no jewels; she owned none.

"Shut your eyes, dear," commanded Miss Quiney, and, stealing up behind her, slipped and clasped the necklace about her throat, then fell back, admiring the reflection in the glass.

"Oh, Tatty!"

But Ruth, too, had to pause for a moment to admire. When she turned, Miss Quiney, forgetting her own injunction, had stolen in haste from the room.

The girl's eyes moistened. For a moment she saw herself reflected from the glass in a blur. Then through the blur the necklace took shape, point by point of light, pearl by pearl, until the whole chain grew definite in the parting of the bodice, resting on the rise of her young bosom.

Yes, and the girl saw that it was good.

A string of words danced upon her brain, as though the mirrored pearls reflected them.

She shall be brought unto the King . . . the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company.

Chapter V.

SIR OLIVER'S HEALTH.

"De lady is here, yo' Honah!"

Manasseh announced it from the doorway and stood aside. Of the company four had already succumbed and slid from their chairs. The others staggered to their feet, Sir Oliver as promptly as any. With a face unnaturally white he leaned forward, clutching the edge of the long oval table, and stared between the silver candelabra down the broken ranks of his guests—Mr. Silk, purple of face as his patron was pale; Ned Manley, maundering the tag of a chorus; Captain St. Maur, Captain Goodacre, and Ensign Lumley, British officers captured by the French at Fort Chanseau and released to live at Boston on parole until the war should end; Mr. Fynes, the Collector's Secretary; Mr. Bythesea, Deputy-Collector; young Shem Hacksteed and young Denzil Baynes, sons of wealthy New Englanders, astray for the while, and sowing their wild oats in a society openly scornful of New England traditions.

Batty Langton's was the chair nearest the door, and Batty Langton was the one moderately sober man of the company. He had not heard, in time to interfere, the proposal to send for Ruth: it had started somewhere at the Collector's end of the table. But trifler though he was, he thought it cruel to the girl—a damnable shame—and pulled himself together to prevent what mischief he might. At the same time he felt curious to see her, curious to learn if these many months of seclusion had fulfilled the Collector's wager that Ruth Josselin would grow to be the loveliest woman in America. At Manasseh's announcement he faced about, and, with a gasp, clutched at the back of his chair.

In the doorway stood little Miss Quiney. It was so ludicrous a disappointment that for the moment no one found speech. Langton heard Goodacre, behind him, catch his breath upon a wondering "O—oh!" and felt the shock run down the table along the unsteady ranks. At the far end a voice—Mr. Silk's—cackled and burst into unseemly laughter.

Langton swung round. "Mr. Fynes," he called sharply, "oblige me, please, by silencing that clergyman—with a napkin in his mouth, if necessary."

He turned again to Miss Quiney. "Madam," he said, offering his arm, "let me lead you to a seat by Sir Oliver."

The little lady accepted with a curtsy. A faint flush showed upon either cheek bone, and in her eyes could be read the light of battle. It commanded his admiration the more that her small arm trembled against his sleeve. "The courage of it," he murmured; "and Miss Quiney of all women!"

She needed courage. The Collector's handsome face greeted her with a scowl and a hard stare; he could be intractable in his cups.

"Excuse me, madam, but I sent for Miss Josselin."

She answered him, but first made low obeisance. "Ruth Josselin will attend, sir, with all despatch. The sedan is capable of accommodating but one at a time."

There stood an empty chair on the Collector's right. To set it for her Mr. Langton had, as a preliminary, to stoop and drag aside the legs of a reveller procumbent on the floor. The effort flushed him; but Miss Quiney, with an inclination of the head, slipped into the seat as though she had seen nothing unusual.

"And it gives me the occasion," she continued respectfully, as her eyes passed over the form of young Manley opposite, who stood with his glass at an angle, spilling its wine on the mahogany, "of expressing—I thank you. . . . What? Is it Mr. Silk? A pleasure, indeed! . . .Yes, I rarely take wine, but on such an occasion as this—an occasion, as I was saying, to felicitate Sir Oliver Vyell on his accession to a title which we, who have served him, best know his capacity to adorn."

"Oh, damn!" growled the Collector under his breath.

"Half a glassful only!" Miss Quiney entreated, as Mr. Silk poured for her. She was, in fact, desperately telling herself that if she attempted to lift a full glass, her shaking hand would betray her.

"Yo' Honah—Mis' Josselin!"

Mr. Langton had caught the sound of Manasseh's footfall in the corridor without, and was on the alert before the girl entered. But at sight of her in the doorway he fell back for a moment.

Yes, the Collector's promise had come true—and far more than true.
She was marvellous.

It was by mere beauty, too, that she dazzled, helped by no jewels but the one plain rope of pearls at her throat. She stood there holding herself erect, but not stiffly, with chin slightly lifted; not in scorn, nor yet in defiance, though you were no sooner satisfied of this than a tiniest curve of the nostril set you doubting. But no; she was neither scornful nor defiant—alert rather, as a fair animal quivering with life, confronting some new experience that for the moment it fails to read. Or—borrowing her morning's simile, to convert it—you might liken her to huntress-maiden Diana, surprised upon arrested foot; instep arched, nostril quivering to the unfamiliar, eyes travelling in sudden speculation over a group of satyrs in a glade. For a certainty that poise of the chin emphasised the head's perfect carriage; as did the fashion of her head-tire, too—the hair drawn straight above the brows and piled superbly, to break and escape in two careless love-locks on the nape of the neck—in the ripple of each a smile, correcting the goddess to the woman. The right arm hung almost straight at her side, the hand ready to gather a fold of the white brocaded skirt; the left slanted up to her bosom, where its finger-tips touched the stem of a white rose in the lace at the parting of the bodice. . . .

So she stood—for ten seconds maybe—under the droop of the heavy curtain Manasseh held aside for her. The hush of the room was homage to her beauty. Her gaze, passing between the lines of his guests, sought the Collector. It was fearless, but held a hint of expectancy. Perhaps she waited for him to leave his place and come forward to receive her. But he made no motion to do this; not being, in fact, sufficient master of his legs.

"Good-evening, my lord!" She swept him a curtsy. "You sent for me?"

Before he could answer, she had lowered her eyes. They rested on a chair that happened to stand empty beside Batty Langton, and a slight inclination of the head gave Langton to understand that she wished him to offer it. He did so, and she moved to it. The men, embarrassed for a moment by their host's silence—they had expected him to answer her, but he stood staring angrily as one rebuffed—followed her cue and reseated themselves. He, too, dropped back in his chair, leaned forward for the decanter, and poured himself more wine. The buzz of talk revived, at first a word or two here and there, tentative after the check, then more confidently. Within a minute the voices were babel again.

Batty Langton pondered. A baronet should not be addressed as "my lord," and she had been guilty of a solecism. At the same time her manner had been perfect; her carriage admirably self-possessed. Her choice of a seat, too, at the end of the table and furthest from Sir Oliver—if she had come unwillingly—had been wittily taken, and on the moment, and with the appearance of deliberate ease.

"They will be calling on you presently to drink our host's health," he suggested, clearing a space of the table in front of her and collecting very dexterously two or three unused wine-glasses. Champagne? . . . Miss Quiney is drinking champagne, I see, though her neighbours have deserted it for red wine. Sir Oliver, by the way, grows lazy in pushing the decanters. . . . Shall I signal to him?"

"On no account. Champagne, if you please . . . though I had rather you kept it in readiness."

"I am sorry, Miss Josselin, but there you ask of me the one thing impossible. I cannot abide to let wine stand and wait; and champagne— watch it, how it protests!" He filled her glass and refilled his own. "By the way," he added, sinking his voice, "one is permitted to congratulate a debutante?"

"And to criticise."

"There was nothing to criticise except—Oh, well, a trifle. At home in
England we don't 'my lord' a mere baronet, you know."

"But since he is my lord?" She smiled gently, answering his puzzled stare. "How, otherwise, should I be here?"

Mr. Langton took wine to digest this. He shook his head. "You must forgive me. It is clear that I am drunk—abominably drunk—for I miss the point—"

"You accuse yourself unjustly."

"Do I? Well, I have certainly drunk a deal more wine than is good for me, and it will be revenged to-morrow. As a rule,"—he glanced around at his fellow-topers—"I pride myself that in head and legs I am inexpugnable. We all have our gifts; and i' faith until a moment ago I was patting myself on the back for owning this one."

"And why, Mr. Langton?"

"On the thought, Mistress Josselin, that I had cut out the frigate, as our tars say, and towed the prize to moorings before the others could fire a gun."

"I had hoped," she murmured, and bent her eyes on the wine-bubbles winking against the rim of her glass, "you did it in simple kindness."

"Well," he owned slowly, "and so I did. This belittling of good intentions, small enough to begin with, is a cursed habit, and I'll renounce it for once. It was little—it was nothing; yet behold me eager to be thanked."

"I thank you." She fingered the stem of the glass, not lifting her eyes. "But you have belittled me, too. I read it in books, and here on the threshold, as I step outside of books, you meet me with it. We women are always, it seems, poor ships, beating the seas, fleeing capture; and our tackle, our bravery—" She broke off, and sat musing, while her fingers played with the base of the glass.

"I take back my metaphors, Miss Josselin. I admit myself no buccaneer, but a simple ass who for once pricked ears on an honest impulse."

"That is better. But hush! Mr. Manley, yonder, is preparing to sing."

Mr. Manley, a young protege of the Collector's, had a streak of genius as an architect and several lesser gifts, among them a propensity for borrowing and a flexible tenor voice. He trolled an old song, slightly adapted—

"Here's a health unto Sir Oliver,
With a fal-la-la, lala-la-la;
Confusion to his enemies,
With a fa-la-la, lala-la-la;
And he that will not drink his health,
I wish him neither wit nor wealth,
Nor yet a rope to hang himself—
With a fa-la-la, lala-la-la."

The effort was applauded. Above the applause the bull voice of Mr. Silk shouted,—

"But Miss Josselin has not drunk it yet! Langton monopolises her.
Miss Josselin! What has Miss Josselin to say?"

The cry was taken up. "Miss Josselin! Miss Josselin!"

Batty Langton arose, glass in hand. "Is it a toast, gentlemen?"
He glanced at Sir Oliver, who sat sombre, not lifting his eyes.
"Our host permits me. . . . Then I give you 'Miss Josselin!'"
Acclamations drowned his voice here, and the men sprang up, waving their
glasses. Sir Oliver stood with the rest.

"Miss Josselin! Miss Josselin!" they shouted, and drank what their unsteady hands left unspilt. Langton waited, his full glass half upraised.

"Miss Josselin," he repeated very deliberately on the tail of the uproar, "who honours this occasion as Sir Oliver's ward."

For about five seconds an awkward silence held the company. Their fuddled memories retained scraps of gossip concerning Ruth, her history and destiny—gossip scandalous in the main. One or two glanced at the Collector, who had resumed his seat—and his scowl.

"The more reason she should drink his health." Again Mr. Silk was fugleman.

His voice braved it off on the silence. Ruth was raising her glass. Her eyes sought Miss Quiney's; but Miss Quiney's, lifted heavenward, had encountered the ceiling upon which Mr. Manley had recently depicted the hymeneals of Venus and Vulcan, not omitting Mars; and the treatment—a riot of the nude—had for the moment put the redoubtable little lady out of action.

Ruth leaned forward in her seat, lifting her glass high. It brimmed, but she spilled no drop.

"To Sir Oliver!"

Chapter VI.

CAPTAIN HARRY AND MR. HANMER.

"Guests, has he?—Out of my road, you rascal! Guests? I'll warrant there's none so welcome—"

A good cheery voice—a voice the curtain could not muffle—rang it down the corridor as on the note of a cornet.

The wine was at Ruth's lip, scarcely wetting it. She lowered the glass steadily and turned half-about in her chair at the moment when, as before a whirlwind, the curtain flew wide and a stranger burst in on the run with Manasseh at his heels.

"Oliver!" The stranger drew himself up in the doorway—a well-knit figure of a man, clear of eye, bronzed of hue, clad in blue sea-cloth faced with scarlet, and wearing a short sword at the hip. "Where's my Oliver?" he shouted. "You'll forgive my voice, gentlemen. I'm Harry Vyell, at your service, fresh from shipboard, and not hoarse with anthems like old what-d'ye-call-him." Running his gaze along the table, he sighted the Collector and broke into a view-halloo.

"Oliver! Brother Noll!" Captain Harry made a second run of it, caught his foot on the prostrate toper whom Langton had dragged out of Miss Quiney's way, and fell on his brother's neck. Recovering himself with a "damn," he clapped his left hand on Sir Oliver's shoulder, seized Sir Oliver's right in his grip and started pump-handling—"as though" murmured Langton, "the room were sinking with ten feet of liquor in the hold."

"Harry—is it Harry?" Sir Oliver stammered, and made a weak effort to rise.

"Lord! You're drunk!" Captain Harry crowed the cheerful discovery. "Well, and I'll join you—but in moderation, mind! Newly married man— if some one will be good enough to pass the decanter? . . . My dear fellow! . . . Cast anchor half an hour ago—got myself rowed ashore hot-foot to shake my Noll by the hand. Lord, brother, you can't think how good it feels to be married! Sally won't be coming ashore to-night; the hour's too late, she says; so I'm allowed an hour's liberty." Here the uxorious fellow paused on a laugh, indicating that he found irony in the word. "But Sally—capital name, Sally, for a sailor's wife; she's Sarah to all her family, Sal to me—Sally is cunning. Sally gives me leave ashore, but on condition I take Hanmer to look after me. He's my first lieutenant—first-rate officer, too—but no ladies' man. Gad!" chuckled Captain Harry, "I believe he'd run a mile from a petticoat. But where is he? Hi, Hanmer! step aft-along here and be introduced!"

A tall grave man, who had entered unnoticed, walked past the line of guests and up to his captain. He too wore a suit of blue with scarlet facings, and carried a short sword or hanger at his belt. He stood stiffly, awaiting command. The candle-light showed, beneath his right cheek bone, the cicatrix of a recent wound.

But Captain Harry, slewing round to him, was for the moment bereft of speech. His gaze had happened, for the first time, on little Miss Quiney.

"Eh?" he stammered, recovering himself. "Your pardon, ma'am. I wasn't aware that a lady—" Here his eyes, travelling to the end of the table, were arrested by the vision of Ruth Josselin. "Wh-e-ew!" he whistled, under his breath.

"Sir Oliver—" Batty Langton stood up.

"Hey?" The name gave Captain Harry yet another shock. He spun about again upon his brother. "'Sir Oliver'? Whats he saying?"

"You've not heard?" said the Collector, gripping his words slowly, one by one. "No, of course you've not. Harry, our uncle is dead."

There was a pause. "Poor old boy!" he muttered. "Used to be kind to us, Noll, after his lights. If it hadn't been for his womenkind."

"They're coming across to visit me, damn 'em!"

"What? Aunt Carrie and Di'? . . . Good Lord!"

"They're on the seas at this moment—may be here within the week."

"Good Lord!" Captain Harry repeated, and his eyes wandered again to Ruth
Josselin. "Awkward, hey? . . . But I say, Noll—you really are Sir
Oliver! Dear lad, I give you joy, and with all my heart. . . .
Gad, here's a piece of news for Sally!"

Again he came to a doubtful halt, and again with his eyes on Ruth Josselin. He was not a quick-witted man, outside of his calling, nor a man apt to think evil; but he had been married a month, and this had been long enough to teach him that women and men judge by different standards.

"Sir Oliver," repeated Langton, "Miss Josselin craves your leave to retire."

"Yes, dear"—Miss Quiney launched an approving nod towards her—"I was about to suggest it, with Sir Oliver's leave. The hour is late, and by the time the sedan-chair returns for me—"

"There is no reason, Tatty, why we should not return together," said Ruth quietly. "The night is fine; and, with Manasseh for escort, I can walk beside your chair."

"Pardon me, ladies," put in Mr. Silk. "Once in the upper town, you may be safe enough; but down here by the quay the sh—sailors—I know 'em— it's my buishness. 'Low me—join the eshcort."

But here, perceived by few in the room, a somewhat remarkable thing happened. Mr. Hanmer, who had stood hitherto like a statue, put out a hand and laid it on Mr. Silk's shoulder; and there must have been some power in that grip, for Mr. Silk dropped into his seat without another word.

Captain Harry saw it, and broke into a laugh.

"Why, to be sure! Hanmer's the very man! The rest of ye too drunk— meaning no offence; and, for me,—well, for me, you see there's Sally to be reckoned with." He laughed aloud at this simple jocularity. "Hanmer!"

"Yes, sir."

"Convoy."

"If you wish it, sir." The lieutenant bowed stiffly; but it was to be noted that the scar, which had hitherto showed white on a bronzed cheek, now reddened on a pale one.

Miss Quiney hesitated. "The gentleman, as a stranger to Boston—"

"I'll answer for Hanmer, ma'am. You'll get little talk out of him; but, be there lions at large in Boston, Jack Hanmer'll lead you past 'em."

"Like Mr. Greatheart in the parable," spoke up Ruth, whose eyes had been taking stock of the proposed escort, though he stood in the penumbra and at half the room's length away. "Tatty—if my lord permit and Lieutenant Hanmer be willing—"

She stood up, and with a curtsy to Sir Oliver, swept to the door. Miss Quiney pattered after; and Mr. Hanmer, with a bow and hand lifted to the salute, stalked out at their heels.

"I'll warrant Jack Hanmer 'd liefer walk up to a gun," swore Captain
Harry as the curtain fell behind them. "He bolts from the sight of
Sally. I'll make Sally laugh over this." But here he pulled himself up
and added beneath his voice, "I can't tell her, though."

The road as it climbed above the town toward Sabines grew rough and full of pitfalls. Even by the light of the full moon shining between the elms Miss Quiney's chairmen were forced to pick their way warily, so that the couple on the side-walk—which in comparison was well paved— easily kept abreast of them.

Ruth walked with the free grace of a Dryad. The moonlight shone now and again on her face beneath the arch of her wimple; and once, as she glanced up at the heavens, Mr. Hanmer—interpreting that she lifted her head to a scent of danger, and shooting a sidelong look despite himself—surprised a lustre as of tears in her eyes; whereupon he felt ashamed, as one who had intruded on a secret.

"Mr. Hanmer."

"Ma'am?"

"I have a favour to beg. . . . Is it true, by the way," she asked mischievously, "that to talk with a woman distresses you?"

"Ma'am—"

"My name is Ruth Josselin."

Mr. Hanmer either missed to hear the correction or heard and put it aside. "Been at sea all my life," he explained. "They caught me young."

Ruth looked sideways at him and laughed—a liquid little laugh, much like the bubbling note of a thrush. "You could not have given an answer more pat, sir. I want to speak to you about a child, caught young and about to be taken to sea. You are less shy with children, I hope?"

"Not a bit," confessed Mr. Hanmer. He added, "They take to me, though— the few I've met.

"Dick will take to you, for certain. Dicky is Sir Oliver's child."

"I didn't know—" Mr. Hanmer came to a full stop.

"No," said Ruth, as though she echoed him. "He is eight years old almost." Her eyes looked straight ahead, but she was aware that his had scanned her face for a moment, and almost she felt his start of reassurance.

"So, the child being a friend of mine, and his father having promised him a cruise in the Venus, you see that I very much want to know what manner of lady is Captain Harry's wife; and that I could not ask you point-blank because you would have set the question down to idle curiosity. . . . It might make all the difference to him," she added, getting no answer.

"A child of eight, and the country at war!" Mr. Hanmer muttered.
"His father must know that we cruise ready for action."

"I tell you, sir, what Dicky told me this morning."

"But it's impossible!"

"To that, sir, I might find you half a dozen answers. To begin with, we all know—and Sir Oliver perhaps, from private information, knows better than any of us—that peace is in sight. Here in the northern Colonies it has arrived already; the enemy has no fleet on this side of the world, and on this coast no single ship to give you any concern."

"Guarda-costas? There may be a few left on the prowl, even in these latitudes. I don't believe it for my part; we've accounted for most of 'em. Still—"

"And Captain Harry thinks so much of them that he sails from Carolina to
Boston with his bride on board!"

"You are right, Miss Josselin, and you are wrong. . . . Mistress Vyell has come to Boston in the Venus; and by reason that her husband, when he started, had as little acquaintance with fear for others as for himself. But if she return to Carolina it will be by land or when peace is signed. Love has made the Captain think; and thought has made him— well, with madam on board, I am thankful—" He checked himself.

"You are thankful he did not sight a guarda-costa." She concluded the sentence for him, and walked some way in silence, while he at her side was silent, being angry at having said so much.

"Yet Captain Harry is recklessly brave?" she mused.

"To the last degree, Miss Josselin," Mr. Hanmer agreed eagerly. "To the last degree within the right military rules. Fighting a ship's an art, you see."

It seemed that she did not hear him. "It runs in the blood," she said. She was thinking, fearfully yet exultantly, of this wonderful power of women, for whose sake cowards will behave as heroes and heroes turn to cowards.

They had outstripped the chairmen, and were at the gate of Sabines. He held it open for her. She bethought her that his last two or three sentences had been firmly spoken, that his voice had shaken off its husky stammer, and on the impulse of realised power she took a fancy to hear it tremble again.

"But if madam will not be on board to look after Dicky, the more will he need a friend. Mr. Hanmer, will you be that friend?"

"You are choosing a rough sort of nurse-maid."

"But will you?" She faced him, wonderful in the moonlight.

His eyes dropped. His voice stammered, "I—I will do my best, Miss
Josselin."

She held out a hand. He took it perforce in his rope-roughened paw, held it awkwardly for a moment, and released it as one lets a bird escape.

Ruth smiled. "The best of women," ran a saying of Batty Langton's, "if you watch 'em, are always practising; even the youngest, as a kitten plays with a leaf."

They stood in silence, waiting for the chair to overtake them.

"Tatty, you are a heroine!"

Miss Quiney, unwinding a shawl from her head under the hall-lamp, released herself from Ruth's embrace. Her nerve had been strained and needed a recoil.

"Maybe," she answered snappishly. "For my part, I'd take more comfort, just now, to be called a respectable woman."

Ruth laughed, kissed her again, and stood listening to the footsteps as they retreated down the gravelled way. Among them her ear distinguished easily the firm tread of Mr. Hanmer.

Chapter VII.

FIRST OFFER.

A little before noon next day word came to her room that Sir Oliver had called and desired to speak with her.

She was not unprepared. She had indeed dressed with special care in the hope of it; but she went to her glass and stood for a minute or two, touching here and there her seemly tresses.

Should she keep him waiting—keep him even a long while? . . . He deserved it. . . . But ah, no! She was under a vow never to be other than forthright with him; and the truth was, his coming filled her with joy.

"I am glad you have come!" These, in fact, were her first words as he turned to face her in the drawing-room. He had been standing by the broad window-seat, staring out on the roses.

"You guess, of course, what has brought me?" He had dressed himself with extreme care. His voice was steady, his eye clear, and only a touch of pallor told of the overnight debauch. "I am here to be forgiven."

"Who am I, to forgive?"

"If you say that, you make it three times worse for me. Whatever you are does not touch my right to ask your pardon, or my need to be forgiven—which is absolute."

"No," she mused, "you are right. . . . Have you asked pardon of Tatty?"

"I have, ten minutes ago. She sent the message to you."

"Tatty was heroic"—Ruth paused on the reminiscence with a smile—" and, if you will believe me, quite waspish when I told her so."

"You should have refused to come. You might have known that I was drunk, or I could never have sent."

"How does it go?" She stood before him, puckering her brows a little as she searched to remember the words—"'On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded the seven chamberlains—'"

"Spare me."

"'—to bring Vasbti the queen before the king with the crown royal, to show the people and the princes her beauty, for she was fair to look on.' Do I quote immodestly, my lord?"

"Not immodestly," he answered. "For I think—I'll be sworn—no woman ever had half your beauty without knowing it. But you quote mal a propos. Queen Vashti refused to come."

"'Therefore was the king very wroth, and his anger burned in him.'"

"I think, again, that you were not the woman to obey any such fear."

"No. Queen Vashti refused to come, being a queen. Whereas I, my lord—

"'Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?'"

"My slave?" he asked. "Setting aside last night—when I was disgustingly drunk—have you a single excuse for using that word?"

"Of your giving, none. You have been more than considerate. Of my own choosing, yes."

He stared.

"At any rate Tatty is not your slave," she went on, and he smiled with her. "I am glad you asked Tatty's pardon. Did she forgive you easily?"

"Too easily. She was aware, she said, that gentlemen would be gentlemen."

"She must have meant precisely the reverse."

"Was I pretty bad?"

She put a hand across her eyes as if to brush the image from them. "What matters the degree? It was another man seated and wearing my lord's body. That hurt."

"By God, Ruth, it shall never happen again!"

She winced as he spoke her name, and her colour rose. "Please make no promise in haste," she said.

"Excuse me; when a man takes an oath for life, the quicker he's through
with it the better—at least that's the way with us Vyells.
It's trifles—like getting drunk, for instance—we do deliberately.
Believe me, child, I have a will of my own."

"Yes," she meditated, "I believe you have a strong will."

"'Tis a swinish business, over-drinking, when all's said and done." He announced it as if he made a discovery; and indeed something of a discovery it was, for that age. "Weakens a man's self-control, besides dulling his palate. . . . They tell me, by the way, that after you left I beat Silk."

Ruth looked grave. "You did wrong, then."

"Silk is a beast."

"An excellent reason for not making him your guest; none for striking him at your own table."

"Perhaps not." Sir Oliver shrugged his shoulders. "Well, he can have his revenge, if he wants it."

"How so? As a clergyman he cannot offer to fight you, and as a coward he would not if he could."

"Is one, then, to be considerate with cowards?"

"Certainly, if you honour cowards with your friendship."

"Friendship! . . . The dog likes his platter and I suffer him for his talk. When his talk trespasses beyond sufferance, I chastise him. That's how I look at it."

"I am sorry, my lord, that Mr. Silk should make the third on your list this morning."

"Oh, come; you don't ask me to apologise to Silk!"

"To him rather than to me."

"But—oh nonsense! He was disgusting—unspeakable, I tell you. If you suppose I struck him for nothing—"

"I do not."

"You cannot think what he said."

"Something about me, was it not?" Then, as Sir Oliver stood silent, "Something a great many folk—your guests included—are quite capable of thinking about me, though they have not Mr. Silk's gift of language."

"—That gift for which (you will go on to remind me) I suffer him."

"No; that gift which (you said) trespasses beyond sufferance."
She did not remind him that he, after all, had exposed her and provoked
Mr. Silk's uncleanly words.

Both were beating time now. He had come, as was meet, to offer an apology, and with no intent beyond. He found not only that Ruth Josselin was grown a woman surpassing fair, but that her mere presence (it seemed, by no will of hers, but in spite of her will) laid hold of him, commanding him to face a further intent. It was wonderful, and yet just at this moment it mattered little, that the daylight soberly confirmed what had dazzled his drunkenness over night; that her speech added good sense to beauty. . . . What mattered at the moment was a sense of urgency, oppressing and oppressed by an equal sense of helplessness.

He had set the forces working and, with that, had chosen to stand aside—in indolence partly, partly in a careful cultivated indifference, but in part also obeying motives more creditable. He had stood aside, promising the result, but himself dallying with time. And lo! of a sudden the result had overtaken him. Had he created a monster, in place of a beautiful woman, he had not been more at its mercy.

But why this sense of urgency? And why should he allow it to oppress him?