'You dear, sweet child,' he said, 'I'll never know how to thank you for my worthless life. You're the cherub, Lotty, who sits up aloft to—to'——
'But I mustn't sit up aloft,' she said naïvely, and wriggled down.
Yet in his gratitude he had kissed her brow and her bonny hair, and now he set her to arrange the flowers, watching her every action as she did so.
There would be nothing doing in Biffins's camp to-day; and as the doctor forbade Antony to go out, that same afternoon Lotty and Wallace came to the 'Gipsy Queen' with the violin. Wallace did not play, though he looked clever enough for anything; but during the performance of his little mistress he lay on the sofa on a rug which Antony had put there for him and never took his eyes off the child, often heaving big sighs, and one cannot really help wondering what dogs are thinking about when they behave in this way. Does the playing actually bring them pleasure, or do they but suffer the music in silent sorrow? Who can answer? One thing at least is certain: man's friend the dog knows far more than people who do not know him would give him credit for. But Antony was really and truly thrilled by this child's remarkable performance. He was much surprised, however, when presently she suddenly laid down both fiddle and bow and burst into a flood of tears. Antony was astonished—thunderstruck, one might say; and if there was anything more than another that could appeal to this young fellow's manly heart it was the tears of grief. But she was quickly better and smiling again; only, although he tried to find out the cause of the sudden outbreak he utterly failed. All she would say was, 'It is nothing. I will tell you some time, or Mary or Crona will tell you.'
But the truth was not far to seek; for, just as she was playing, she happened to look out of the window and her eyes fell on her father. His face was hard-set and stern; and this, coupled with his language at the time when Antony was brought to the beach apparently dead, caused Lotty to believe now that he was really not over-well pleased that his guest had been brought back to life again.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MYSTERY OF THE MERMAN.
IT is around the unknown and the unknowable in this world that terror and superstition mostly cling. Had any one invented the telegraph, the telephone, or any other of the wonders developed by a proper knowledge of the powers of electricity, three hundred years ago, ten to one that individual would have been condemned to the stake as being in league with the Evil One.
We have all of us heard tell of or read about mermaids and mermen, but few perhaps of the cultivated believe in such beings nowadays. People in the far north of Scotland, especially those born and bred among the wild, weird mountains and glens, and the misty and awful gloom that often settles over these for days, are different. No wonder that in such localities ghosts are often said to be seen, and mournful cries are heard by night or while storms of wind and rain are raging. But it was more among the lone Hebrides that mermaids were believed in, and it is not so very long ago that an old laird lived who credited the notion that these semi-fairies had really been seen and heard.
It remained, however, for the king of the gipsies, Biffins Lee, not only to see one, not only to capture one, but to exhibit the creature in a huge tank at the Queerest Show on Earth.
It was many months before Antony Blake came north here to buy the beautiful saloon caravan 'Gipsy Queen,' and upon an evening in summer, when two fishermen were slowly pulling their boat across a rock-girt bay, that a mermaid suddenly appeared to them.