He answered her very respectfully—and very coldly:
"I think you should hardly ask me, Miss Stanley. If you consider, you will see that I could not well interfere—even so far as to offer advice. You will find Mr. Purdie will know how to deal with such a case."
"Mr. Purdie!" she said. "I cannot have Mr. Purdie here the whole year round. Surely I can do something myself? Cannot you tell me what to do?"
He hesitated. But here was a very beautiful young woman, appealing to him, and apparently in distress.
"Well," said he, at length, "I am not quite sure, but I fancy if you wish to have those men removed, you would have to take proceedings under the Vagrant Act. I am not quite sure; I fancy that is so. But then, if you do that, you will be denounced by the Highland Land League, and by plenty of the newspapers—natural enough on the part of the newspapers, for they would know nothing of the circumstances."
Käthchen thought that the outlaw and savage (as he had been described to her) talked very reasonably and intelligently; but Mary Stanley was quite as much perplexed as before.
"I don't want to bring the law to bear on anybody," she said. "I don't want to injure anybody. Surely there are other ways. If I go to those men, and show them they have no right to be there, and pay them for the lobster-traps that were burned, and give them each a sum of money, surely they would go away home to their own island?" And then she added (for she wasn't a fool), "Or might not that merely induce a lot more to come in their place?"
"I am afraid it would," said he.
But by this time the big steamer was slowing in to the pier.
"Miss Stanley," said young Ross, "would you mind coming this way a little—to be out of the reach of the rope?"