"Impudent fellow," he muttered, setting his teeth, "to speak to an Archdale in that style. I can't believe him. I shall have Allston examine his proofs; he has a hawk's eye for flaws. But there's the likeness. Yes, his story may be true; but the man has the making of a knave in him, if the work is not done already."

It was almost dinner time. Elizabeth had been out sailing with Madam Archdale, Colonel Pepperell, and Sir Temple, and Lady Dacre. They were in the Colonel's boat; and Madam Pepperell, who had been detained, had sent her young guest to represent her. But Edmonson had gone off with his host to Colonel Archdale's, and Bulchester had mysteriously disappeared soon afterward. Elizabeth suspected that he had gone to pay a visit to Katie and had found her so fascinating that he could not tear himself from her society, or that he had wandered off somewhere by himself to dwell upon her perfections. "Poor simpleton!" she said to herself in the revulsion from her fears of the night before. At all events, the result was the same; there were only three at Seascape to accept the Colonel's invitation to go sailing.

It was always a refreshment to Elizabeth to be with Sir Temple and Lady Dacre; that morning it was even better than being alone; they were the only ones purely spectators in the drama of struggle and suffering going on under the courtesies that were its scenic accompaniments. When they talked and jested it was out of happy hearts, at least so far as the things about them were concerned, and for this reason the strain was taken from her in their presence. She had only to be gay enough, and there was no need of watching her words lest they should be misconstrued. If she had been asked why anything that she said or did was liable to be misconstrued, she could not have told. This was her feeling, but she did not see her way; no flash of the electric storm that the blackness foreboded had yet shown her where she stood; but the elemental conditions affected her.

The boat on its return had landed Madam Archdale and her guests on the pebbly beach at Seascape, not far from the house. They had said farewell and sauntered up the path toward it and disappeared. The boat was about putting out again when a man came running up to the Colonel, and begged him to wait to speak with the Captain of a schooner standing out about half a mile. The Captain had come ashore on purpose to see him and was a little way down the beach now hurrying toward him. The business was urgent.

"Go back without me," the Colonel said. "I may be kept here for some time." But Elizabeth had had enough of sailing for that day; she was already on shore and said that she would rather walk home. As Pepperell left her with an apology she walked on a few rods, and stopped to speak to a fisherman cleaning his boat. She had seen him at the house and had heard that he had lost his child the week before. As she turned from him she went on slowly until she came to where a boulder towered over her head and seemed to bar her progress except along the shore. She knew the zigzag way that wound about its base and led her into the straight path again which would take her across the grounds of Seascape and bring her into the road not far from Colonel Pepperell's home. But before she had time to enter this way, voices on the other side of the boulder startled her. Her first thought was that Lady Dacre and her husband had come back. But she perceived that the tones were Bulchester's. She stood still an instant, wishing that she could reach the road without being obliged to talk to him or any one, she felt so little like it. But there was no hope of that. There was a rough seat cut in the stone on the other side; the views landward and seaward were delightful; the great elm near by shaded the place, and Bulchester had probably ensconced himself there with somebody else. She must go by, and if they even joined her, it was no matter. She made a movement forward, when Edrnonson's voice with a ring that she had never heard in it came to her ears. Yet it was not his tones, but his words, that made her cower and stand motionless with startled eyes and parted lips, until, slowly, as wonder grew into disgust, her face crimsoned from brow to throat and drooped, as if to hide from itself. Was this the way that men spoke of women, with sneers, with scoffing? In all her innocent life she had never looked even through bars at the world that such expressions revealed, dimly enough to her veiled in her simplicity.

The Puritan spirit of her country, that although it sometimes put bands on the freeman, chained the brute in human nature in his dungeon, lest his breath in the land should breed death, had been in such accord with her own fair womanhood that she had not realized that all the world was not as safe as her own home, as safe, though not as happy. Yet the sneer that Edmonson had spoken seemed to him so slight, so much a matter of course, that it was forgotten as soon as uttered; it was merely his way of looking at a world unknown to his listener. She did not know of what woman it was that he had dared to speak with such contempt; probably of some one she had never seen. It was not at the stranger alone; it was through her at all women that the mire of suspicion had been thrown.

She could not go forward now, and while she stood trying to grow calm through her indignation and seeing that she must go home by the other road, which would take her quite a distance out of her way, scraps of the conversation that fell upon her ears found lodgment in her mind. The two seemed to be talking of some man now. Then all at once she heard Bulchester say:

"It's the oddity that takes you;"—she had lost what went before—"that will soon wear off. But I'm glad enough you're not as wise as I, to prefer the other. What makes you so sure, though, that he has secured your—?" In some movement she lost the last word and the answer, unless it were merely a significant exclamation of belief. "You wouldn't stand upon the chances of change though," resumed Bulchester, "I know you well enough. But, according to you, there's the insuperable obstacle."

Edmonson laughed contemptuously.

"Insuperable?" he answered. "Stray shots have taken off more superfluous kings and men than the world knows of. And just now, with this prospect of war before the country, something is sure to happen,—to happen, Bulchester; luck has a passion for me, and after all her caprices, she is coming to—."