A Gray Eye or So. In Three Volumes—Volume I

by Frank Frankfort Moore

To engage himself to marry Miss Craven was, he believed, equivalent to taking the pledge of the teetotaller so far as his feelings were concerned.

Meantime, however, he remained unpledged and with an unbounded sense of freedom.

And this was why he laughed loud and long when he saw in the course of his stroll around the cliffs, a small oar jammed in a crevice of the rocks a hundred feet below where he was walking.

He laughed again when he had gone—not so cautiously as he might have done—down to the crevice and released the oar.

It was, he knew, the one that had gone adrift from the boat the previous night.

He climbed the cliff to the Banshee’s Cave and deposited the piece of timber in the recesses of that place. Then he lay down on the coarse herbage at the summit of the cliff until it was time to drift to the Castle for lunch. Life at the Castle involved a good deal of drifting. The guests drifted out in many directions after breakfast and occasionally drifted back to lunch, after which they drifted about until the dinner hour.

While taking lunch he was in such good spirits as made Lady Innisfail almost hopeless of him.

Edmund Airey had told her the previous night that Harold intended asking Miss Craven to marry him. Now, however, perceiving how excellent were his spirits, she looked reproachfully across the table at Edmund.

She was mutely asking him—and he knew it—how it was possible to reconcile Harold’s good spirits with his resolution to ask Helen Craven to marry him? She knew—and so did Edmund—that high spirits and the Resolution are rarely found in association.

An hour after lunch the girl with the Brow entreated Harold’s critical opinion on the subject of a gesture in the delivery of a certain poem, and the discussion of the whole question occupied another hour. The afternoon was thus pretty far advanced before he found himself seated alone in the boat which had been at the disposal of himself and Edmund during the two previous afternoons. The oar that he had picked up was lying at his feet along the timbers of the boat.