"Because Mrs. T.-S. hauls us off to tea and gives us a gallon of gossip with every cup."
"I thought your sex regarded gossip as the cream?"
"Sex, indeed! Old Smith is worse than his wife. He doesn't say much, but he winks. One of his winks, at the end of a story, turns an episode into a three-volume novel."
"It seems to me I must teach you the code in my own self-defence," he replied. "And now for tea. Let us have it served here."
They voted this an admirable notion. The girls enlivened the meal by relating to him the doings and sayings of current interest ashore during the past two months. By a queer coincidence, which he did not mention, his relief was again due within a week, just as on the occasion of Enid's first appearance on the rock. The fact struck him as singular. In all probability he would not return to duty. He had completed twenty-one years of active service. Now he would retire, and when the commercial arrangements for the auriscope were completed, he would take his daughters on a long-promised Continental tour, unless, indeed, matters progressed between Stanhope and Enid to the point of an early marriage.
He had foreseen that Stanhope would probably ask Enid to be his wife. He knew the youngster well, and liked him. For the opposition that Lady Margaret might offer he cared not a jot. He smiled inwardly—as the convenient phrase has it—when he reviewed the certain outcome of any dispute between himself and her ladyship. He would surprise her.
Brand, the lighthouse-keeper, and Brand urging the claims of his adopted daughter, would be two very different persons.
Of course, all Penzance knew that he was a gentleman, a scientist in a small way, and a man of means: otherwise Constance and Enid would not have occupied the position they held in local society. Those unacquainted with English ways ofttimes make the mistake of rating a man's social status by the means he possesses or the manner of his life in London. No greater error could be committed. The small, exclusive county town, the community which registers the family connections of many generations, is the only reliable index. Here, to be of gentle birth and breeding—not bad credentials even in the court of King Demos—confers Brahminical rank, no matter what the personal fortunes of the individual.
Brand, it is true, did not belong to a Cornish county family, but there were those who conned him shrewdly. They regarded him as a well-meaning crank, yet the edict went forth that his daughters were to be "received," and received they were, with pleasure and admiration by all save such startled elderly mammas as Lady Margaret Stanhope, who expected her good-looking son to contract a marriage which would restore the failing fortunes of the house.
All unconscious of the thoughts flitting through his brain, for Brand was busy trimming a spare lamp, the two girls amused themselves by learning the semaphore alphabet from a little hand-book which he found for them.