THE
MIS-RULE OF THREE

The Diggings were in a street somewhere off Tottenham Court Road, in a tall, old-fashioned, roomy house which had seen its best days, but which still made a valiant attempt to hold its own in the respectable class in a neighbourhood where respectability is not exactly rampant.

For dingy foreigners of the undesirable class abound exceedingly in those parts, and undesirables of home growth are not unknown there. Indeed, individuals of both these types did get in, now and then, within the hospitable shelter of No. 46 itself, in spite of the anxiety of Mrs Inkersole, the landlady, to preserve the high tone of the house.

But whoever might occupy the ground floor and the first floor of No. 46, whoever might enjoy the solid mahogany and second-hand chenille curtains of the former, or bask in the luxury of alleged Sheraton upholstered in vivid plush and brocade in the latter, the historical Diggings on the second floor remained for month after month in the possession of the famous Three, who were known among the landlady’s family and servants as “The gentlemen.”

Not only did “the gentlemen” occupy the two rooms which constituted the second floor, but they overflowed upwards into two of the small apartments of the rabbit warren which is always to be found on the upper floors of the typical London lodging-house. One of these small upper rooms belonged to Bartlett Bayre, a tall, thin, dark-skinned, black-haired young man, who was a clerk at Somerset House in the first place, and a struggling writer of loftiest ambition but as yet very indifferent success in the second. His room was remarkable for great outward neatness, though the internal condition of the wardrobe and chest of drawers left much to be desired in the way of order.

The little room next to Bayre’s was occupied by Ted Southerley, a big, broad, stolid, red-faced Northerner, who was “on” two or three papers of no world-wide circulation and with no very certain prospects, and on one which actually paid its way and afforded a modest pittance to its most energetic if, perhaps, slightly commonplace contributor.

The third member of the confraternity was a painter, to whom neither the Academy nor the New Gallery had as yet opened its doors. As the happy possessor of a small allowance from home, which enabled him to enjoy the luxury of being idle and the further luxury of pretending to be very busy at the same time, Jan Repton occupied the place of honour among the three friends: that is to say, he had the back room on the second floor all to himself as combined studio and bedroom. This apartment, therefore, offered a picturesque combination; an easel being placed near the window for the benefit of the north light, while a small bedstead stood in one corner, and a platform for a model occupied the place of honour in the middle of the room. The bedstead was used by day for books, newspapers and parcels of various kinds. The dressing-table made a convenient hat and coat stand; while the washstand was rendered picturesque with a display of palettes, canvases, paint-brushes, and all the paraphernalia of the artist’s profession.

On occasions of state, when friends or cousins from the country were to be entertained, such choice bits of this outfit as seemed adapted to the purposes of the picturesque were transferred to the sitting-room in the front, together with the easel containing the picture upon which Repton was engaged, the model platform and a few bits of cheap brocade, remnants bought at drapers’ sales, to be thrown at random across the well-worn and springless sofa and over the backs of the lodging-house chairs. Also, on these occasions, the solid square table, which would then have been particularly useful, was thrust into the bedroom at the back, so that the visitors might have their tea uncomfortably in corners, on their own laps, in what was felt to be the orthodox studio fashion.

Bayre grumbled on these occasions, objecting to this “faking up” of an unreal atmosphere of artistic luxury to which they were unaccustomed. Ted Southerley growled more openly at the unnecessary discomfort the plan entailed. But Jan Repton was inexorable. Art was superior to all things else: and the artistic atmosphere, according to him, “gave a tone,” which he was not going to sacrifice for any utilitarian whims of “you two fellows.”

It may be mentioned that “Jan” was an assumed name and not Repton’s real baptismal prænomen. He had, in fact, been christened plain “John”; but finding the appellation unsatisfying, he replaced it by the three simple letters which gave him at once a distinction in his small circle, which the circle did not hesitate to inform him was the only one he would ever possess.

It was after an entertainment which had not been altogether satisfactory, Repton having tried to sing and Bayre to play the banjo, both with more exuberant applause than real success, that they were rearranging the furniture in its everyday position one November evening when a certain discontent which had of late been growing in Bayre’s breast reached a momentous crisis.

“I tell you what it is, Repton,” said he, as he managed, after fearful struggles, to get the fourth and last leg of the table through the door into the sitting-room, “all this beastly turn-out and turning everything upside down whenever your friends and relations put in an appearance here is perfectly sickening. Have friends by all means if you like, though Southerley and I can do without denuding half the country parishes in England of their inhabitants at regular intervals to fill our room and eat our bread-and-butter.”

“Bother your bread-and-butter!” said Repton, cheerfully, as he tilted the table over into its place in the middle of the room, and dragged on the dark green tapestry tablecloth with which it was a point of honour to cover the much-dented sham mahogany top. “You could have your own relations here if you liked, or if you’ve got any. I’m not going to let myself grow into a moping misanthrope for you, or for Southerley either, and so I tell you.”

“Nobody wants you to grow into a moping misanthrope, or into anything else you don’t like,” boomed out burly Ted Southerley from the cosy if slightly battered armchair by the fire into which he had dropped with his pipe when the ladies went away. “But I do think, Repton, for all our sakes, you might exercise the principle of judicious selection among your acquaintances, and especially you might introduce a little more variety among the ladies. Your female cousins are thoroughly charming, I admit, but they do run a little to the same type now, don’t they?”

“You have to take your cousins as you can get them,” replied Repton, cheerfully. “Some of us would be glad enough to have cousins at all; and if they were such beauties that they were run after by half London, why, you couldn’t expect them to come up to take tea with us on a second floor now, could you?”

“I shouldn’t expect it,” snapped Bayre. “And more than that, if I have to expect it now it’s not because I like it. To have to sit for two hours listening to a sandy-haired girl who can talk about nothing but the theatres and the opera, and who is trying all the time to impress you with the idea that she belongs to a circle in society where she certainly never set foot herself, and about which you yourself know little and care less, is no end of a bore.”

“She moves in a circle a precious sight better than yours!” retorted Repton, nettled. “And as for talking, she was only trying to find something to say because you were too surly to open your own mouth. And as for her being sandy—”

“I thought you didn’t like women to be intellectual, Bayre,” put in Southerley, anxious to prevent a quarrel. “I can’t make out what it is you want.”

Bayre, thus challenged, sat on the edge of the table, put his hand in his pocket, swung his leg, and laid down the law upon the subject of the Eternal Feminine thus:—

“I like a woman,” said he, “who exhales femininity at every pore. That is to say, one who is above all things modest and even somewhat shy; one who says little, does not trouble her head about the arts or sciences, or about intellectual pursuits, when compared with the interests of the home. There I imagine her supreme; calm, serene, orderly, diffusing a spirit of comfort, an atmosphere of peace, wherever she appears. She has no thought of “Society” in the modern slang sense, because for her Society is concentrated in her home, in the little circle of human beings who depend upon her, as they would upon an all-wise, all-providing, all-healing fairy, for help and sympathy and sunny kindness.”

“What you want is a housekeeper who will darn your socks, cook your mutton chop, and give her whole mind, what she has of it, to making you comfortable,” said Repton, scoffingly.

“Not altogether that, though socks are more comfortable when darned than when in holes, as we occasionally wear them at present, and chops are undoubtedly better cooked than raw,” replied Bayre, suavely.

“What do you think of his precious feminine ideal, Southerley?” asked Repton, with a superb raising of his light eyebrows.

“I think it’s all jolly rot,” said Ted, promptly. “I don’t mean I disapprove of a woman’s being domestic in her tastes—somebody must look after the house, and see to the dinner and all that sort of thing, I suppose; and certainly none of those things would get done very well if they were left to me—but a woman who had her hands always in dough or in dusters, whose mind was divided between her saucepan and her cotton reels, would drive me mad.”

“Do you want small talk and Society slip-slop, then, as accomplishments?” sneered Bayre.

“No,” said Southerley. “What I admire in a woman is spirit and fire, life and animation. My ideal is a girl who can ride like the wind, whose feet dance as she walks, whose eyes are all aglow with life and vitality, and there—I shouldn’t mind if she were a bit of a genius into the bargain!”

“A genius!” roared Repton, derisively. “What should a female genius want with you, Southerley?”

“Well, he’s welcome to her!” put in Bayre with contempt. “It’s the first time I ever heard a sane man say he admired that sort of thing in a woman! And I should think it would be the last! Intellect in a woman—intellect out of the common, I mean: of course I don’t mean that I admire a born fool—is an evil fungus, hideous and useless if not actually noxious in itself, and fatal, too, to the object upon which it has made its home.”

“Very poetical, but very absurd,” remarked Southerley. “The female genius you sneer at so loftily would be much more likely even to manage the house well than the sheep-woman you think so much of. And if she didn’t, at any rate she wouldn’t bore you to death as the other would.”

“Why don’t you get hold of some of your sheep and bring ’em here and let’s see if we can worship ’em too?” suggested Repton, derisively. “They’re common enough; surely you must have a few sisters and cousins and aunts who answer to the description!”

“No,” said Bayre, stolidly. “It happens that I haven’t. I have only one relation in the world that I know anything about, and that’s not much.”

“And who’s he—or she?”

“He is an elder brother of my late father’s, a very rich man who lives a kind of hermit’s life on one of the smaller of the Channel Islands. A bachelor and reputed to be a miser.”

“A bachelor! And very rich! Why don’t you go and look him up?” said Southerley, the matter-of-fact.

“Don’t know that he wants me. If he does, he’s kept the fact very much to himself,” said Bayre.

“If I had a rich bachelor uncle,” said Repton, lightly, “I should go and get him to leave me all his money, and then find a handy cliff—”

“It would be better, first of all,” said Southerley, gravely, “to find out just what ‘very rich’ means. It would be a pity to go and burden one’s soul with a crime under a decent figure. Old gentlemen who live shut up often get the reputation of great wealth on something under two hundred a year!”

“That’s a point worth considering,” admitted Bayre.

“Look here, you fellows,” said Repton, who had grown suddenly thoughtful, “wouldn’t it be a lark if we were all of us to go to the place—wherever it is—Jersey and Guernsey isn’t it? Or is it the Scillies?—and hunt up this recluse? If he didn’t take a fancy to Bayre—and I see heaps of reasons why he shouldn’t—why, he might to you or me, you know, Southerley? And anyhow it would be a bit of a spree, and I could find something to paint. Perhaps get known as the Jersey man, or the Guernsey man, or the Sark man, and make it impossible for anybody to think about any of those places for ever after without thinking of Jan Repton.”

“And I,” said Southerley, “might get some decent ‘copy’ out of them, I fancy. Shirts for sailors at Jersey and Guernsey; cows at Alderney; rocks, I suppose, at Sark. All interesting things that people are dying to know all about. This is to be thought of, Bayre.”

“What on earth you want to go to any place for in order to write about it I don’t know,” observed Bayre, grimly. “For no matter what you see or what you hear, you always manage to report it under such a veneer of commonplace that nobody would ever think you got your information out of anything more up-to-date than the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica!”

“My dear fellow, when you write for commonplace people you must write in a commonplace way. Now you, who write for the people that read your works—people so uncommon that they don’t exist—can ransack the dictionary for obsolete adjectives and introduce compound words that nobody has ever heard of with impunity.”

“I may not find it easy to get to my public,” said Bayre, in whose dark face a flush was rising, “but when I do it won’t consist of the sweepings of the counter and the stable, or of the representatives of the culture created by Snick-snacks.”

“Look here,” broke in Repton, who perceived that the atmosphere was growing rather sultry, “without any chaff, don’t you think a week’s outing might be got out of this idea? It’s the right time of year, in the first place, to see the islands in their everyday aspect, with no taint of the tourist about them.”

“And the right time of year for an awfully rough sea passage!” observed Southerley, who was not a “good sailor.”

Bayre played with his moustache and reflected.

“When you come to think of it,” said he at last, “it’s not such a bad notion of yours, Repton, that we should go and pay the old gentleman a surprise visit. I’ve never been to the Channel Islands, and a blow across the sea would get rid of some of the cobwebs of this infernal city.”

“Don’t abuse old London, I beg,” said Southerley. “It’s the only place worth living in for a man with any brains in his head.”

Repton and Bayre both turned on him looks of scorn. The fact that he had been, in a small and modest way, successful in those callings of Art and Literature in which they themselves had so far failed—for Southerley had had his sketches reproduced in the not over-particular columns of a Sunday paper—rankled in the breasts of both.

“It happens,” said Bayre, “that I could get a holiday now if I liked, and I might not be able to do so later. If you fellows agree to go I’ll make arrangements as soon as you like. I’ve been getting restless lately. Working with no result is not good enough: dull routine work for one’s bread-and-butter and nothing more’s not good enough: this beastly old city’s not good enough: life’s not good enough!”

With which drastic comment on things in general and his own affairs in particular, Bayre began to swing up and down the room at a great rate, with his hands in his pockets and his dark eyes gleaming rather savagely from out of his pale face, to which dark hair worn long gave a certain individuality at which Southerley, with his close-cropped, conventional head, and Repton, with what his friends called his sandy stubble, scoffed long and loudly.

Though neither of the other young men chafed as much under the conditions of existence as Bayre did, the suggestion of a change, of a possibly romantic adventure with a sort of object, seized both of them.

And the end of it was that, without wasting much time in discussion, they all made arrangements for a journey together to the Channel Islands, to hunt out in company this mysterious rich bachelor uncle of Bayre’s in whose existence, perhaps, two of the party scarcely believed at all.

CHAPTER II.
THEY FIND THE GIRL

It was on a Saturday, at 9.15 in the evening, that the three travellers started from Paddington on their search for adventures and Bayre’s rich uncle.

It was very cold, and there was an ill-concealed sentiment abroad that they had chosen a time of year for their expedition which, though distinctly favourable to their chances of having the train, the boat and the islands a good deal to themselves, was not so well chosen as regarded their own comfort and enjoyment.

It was chilly work, as Repton observed, turning out of the train at Weymouth between two and three o’clock in the morning; and when they arrived at Guernsey, after a long and rough sea passage, in the gloom of a November morning, all three travellers were inclined to think that the mildness of the climate had been exaggerated, and to wonder what on earth they had left dear, dirty dark London for at such an unseasonable time.

They had heard, through some acquaintance, before leaving town, of a quiet little lodging-house kept by a Frenchwoman, where they had made up their minds to stay, in pursuance of their determination to follow the usual tourist plans as little as possible.

Their decision involved a rather long walk through streets which looked, in the circumstances, gloomy, grimy and mean; and when at last they arrived at Madame Nicolas’ modest establishment, not having taken the precaution to write and inform her of their coming, they found the place in a decidedly out-of-season condition.

However, Madame, a brisk, black-eyed little woman, and her one servant, a raw-boned, good-humoured country girl in short skirt, jacket tied in by a long apron, and round close cap, were hospitable and even enthusiastic, and within half an hour the travellers were sitting down, in a prim, bare-looking salle-à-manger, to a breakfast of rolls, hot coffee and eggs.

Battered and disorganised by their journey, the three friends passed a lazy day, not straying beyond the limits of the town. They had already, in some measure, lost sight of the avowed object of their journey when Bayre, sitting back comfortably in a chair by the fire while Aurélie was clearing the table after their six-o’clock dinner, asked the girl, in French, if she knew anything about the little island of Creux a few miles away.

Repton and Southerley looked at their companion with eyes full of envy and disgust. Repton had picked up a few words of passable French in the course of summer excursions to Boulogne and other not unknown resorts of the Londoner. Southerley could read French books, but had the proper contempt of a University man for niceties of foreign pronunciation, so that when he conversed in any language but his own he was for the most part unappreciated. Bayre, on the other hand, had condescended to master the French idiom, and had thereby laid himself open to the suspicion of having a terrible past.

What could the ordinary virtuous Englishman want with a thorough command of any tongue but his own? So reasoned his two less-accomplished companions, as, with jealousy in their hearts and scorn on their lips, they watched and listened, and understood a little of what he said but not much of what the voluble Aurélie replied in her Guernsey patois.

Oh, yes, Aurélie knew Creux very well; she had been there more than once herself, but ah! people did not care to go much to Creux since the strange things that had happened there of late, things that made people fancy all was not right on that desolate island. She for one would be very sorry to have to live there, and to lie for nearly a month after she was dead above the ground without a holy word said by priest or pastor!

And Aurélie, who showed by her excitement that she was referring to some event that had recently agitated the neighbourhood, put down her plates, planted her large hands on her hips, and nodded her head with much meaning.

“Why, is it so far away as all that? I thought it was only three or four miles from Guernsey and that communication was constant,” said Bayre.

“Yes, it is not further than that, and when the sea is smooth and the wind light one sails across easily enough. But in stormy weather, like that we had a few months ago, ah! then it is different. It’s all very well when the boat is out in the middle of the channel, if it is guided by a man who understands the currents and the way the wind comes through between the islands. But the shore of Creux is as steep as a wall, and one can neither embark nor land there in bad weather. And that’s how it was that Mees Ford, the cross-grained old cousin who was housekeeper so long to the rich Englishman”—at this point Repton and Southerley strained their attention to the utmost, for they knew that they had got upon the track of Bayre’s uncle already—“had to lie unburied for so long, and that’s how it was that the coffin, with her dead body in it, was washed away at the very moment when it was being lowered into the boat which was to bring it across for burial in our cemetery here.”

Aurélie shuddered at the gruesome story, of which Bayre alone understood the whole, although his two friends gathered enough of it to insist upon the repetition of the tale in such English as the girl could command.

“And when did all this happen?” asked Southerley, who had the reporter’s liking for details.

“One, two, three, four, five, six montz ago,” replied Aurélie, helping out his presumably weak intellect by illustration on her fingers. “Ze weazer was stormy, and ze sea like mountains—so high. It was like zat for near four week.”

“It must be jolly lonely over there,” remarked Repton.

“And was the rich Englishman drowned when the accident happened?” asked Southerley.

“Monsieur Bayre? Oh, no. He save himself, zough he cannot save ze boat from turning over. It was found turned upside down later,” said the girl; “but ze coffin, no, zat was not found.”

“Did you ever hear of this cousin of your uncle’s, Bayre?” said Southerley, who thought the story an odd one, and thought also that the imagination of the islanders might perhaps have been at work upon it.

“I knew he had a housekeeper who was some relation,” answered Bayre.

“Yes, yes, cousin,” interrupted Aurélie, vivaciously, nodding her head two or three times to emphasise her words to the two less-accomplished Englishmen. “She and Monsieur Bayre zey was so much like one anozer, ze same long face like wood, long chin, straight mouz, small eyes zat looked out of ze corners—so!”

“You know him, then? You knew them both?” said Bayre.

“I have seen zem, but not often. Monsieur Bayre, wiz his hard face, and his dress, not like a gentleman’s, but like a fisherman’s, wiz his jersey, his sea-boots, his cap wiz a peak—I have seen him in his boat. Mees Ford I have also seen, when I go to Creux, walking in se cour of ze house, what you call ze yard. But zey do not come here often. Old Pierre Vazon, and his daughter Marie—zey fetch ze sings from St Luke’s for ze château.”

“Château, eh?” said Southerley.

“Oh, that’s what any house that’s not a cottage is called,” explained Bayre. “It doesn’t necessarily mean a mansion. Have you seen Mr Bayre much lately, Aurélie?”

“Not so much since he married his young wife—” began the girl.

But the exclamations of the three young men checked her and made her look round at them.

“Ah! You know him, perhaps, yourselves?” said she quickly, with a sort of guilty look.

After a moment’s breathless pause they all began to ask her questions at once, and while she hesitated, confused, as to what sort of replies she should make, the door opened quickly and Madame Nicolas, whose attention had perhaps been attracted by the noise they all made by crying out at the same time, came in and looked angrily at the servant.

Whether she merely considered that Aurélie was wasting her time, or whether she was anxious to discourage gossip about her neighbours, it was impossible to say. But certain it is that Madame did not leave the room until the maid had gathered up the last vestige of the meal, and that the young men heard her speak in tones of reproof to the girl when the door was closed.

Bayre looked at his companions and laughed.

“Well, Repton, what do you say to that?” said he. “Where are my chances of insinuating myself into the position of heir now?”

“Things begin to look dicky, certainly,” assented Repton, with a mournful shake of the head. “But it’s all your own fault. You should have come sooner.”

“Wonder what the wife’s like!” remarked Southerley. “Wonder where he got her from!”

“Married his kitchenmaid probably,” said Repton. “A sort of Aurélie, I shouldn’t wonder, who wears an all-round cap and sabots.”

“My uncle is a gentleman, not a clod-hopper,” put in Bayre with warmth. “I think we may take it for granted he married a woman in his own rank of life. At least, I object to it’s being taken for granted that he didn’t.”

“My dear fellow, keep your hair on!” said Repton. “It’s quite permissible to wonder whether a man who goes about in a jersey and fisherman’s overalls did or did not marry to suit his rank, or marry to suit his tastes.”

The discussion threatened to grow warm, as discussions between the indiscreet Repton and the more serious Bayre often did. Southerley interposed by observing that they really had nothing to argue upon at present, and that they had better master their subject before they proceeded to disagree about it.

One source of information, however, they now found unavailable. Aurélie had evidently been frightened by her mistress into discretion, for she would answer no more questions about Monsieur Bayre, except by a significant shrug and shake of the head.

It was with a mind full of curiosity about his long-neglected uncle, therefore, that Bartlett Bayre strolled out, on the morning after their arrival in Guernsey, and made his way down to the harbour.

Southerley was there already, and Bayre saw at once, by the look of excitement in his usually lymphatic face, that something of interest had occurred.

“What’s up?” said Bayre, briefly.

“What’s up?” echoed Southerley, getting off the upturned boat on which he had been sitting, and speaking in a voice of mellifluous thunder. “Why, I’ve had an adventure.”

“Already?”

“Yes. At least, perhaps you won’t call it an adventure, but I do. You see that boat out there?”

He pointed to a half-open sailing-boat, strongly made, unpretentious, that stood out at sea a little way from the harbour. It had two small masts, but the sails were down and the little craft moved gently up and down with the swell of the water. There was only one person in it, a man, who sat almost motionless in the stern, with a pipe in his mouth. Bayre followed the direction of his friend’s finger with his eyes, and looked at the boat and its occupant.

“Well?” said he.

“She came ashore in that—” began Southerley.

“Who’s she?”

Southerley looked at him with his face aglow.

“Well, ‘she’ is my ideal, and there you are in a nutshell.”

“No, I’m not there in a nutshell. I don’t understand,” said Bayre, with stolid petulance.

“Oh, you have no imagination. I tell you there stepped ashore out of that battered old boat one of the loveliest creatures that ever walked.” Bayre looked incredulous, but his friend went on: “A queen disguised in a short stuff skirt and a plain jacket and thick boots, but a queen all the same. She skipped out of the boat like a fairy: she tripped along the harbour like a fairy. And I tell you it was all I could do not to run after her, follow her, try to get another look at her.”

“Why on earth didn’t you?” said Bayre, contemptuously.

“Because I couldn’t trust myself. I should have gone down on my knees in the mud and told her there and then that she was the pearl of women,” retorted Southerley, his enthusiasm growing under the stimulus of his companion’s contempt. “No, I must wait here till she comes back, and I shall wait if it’s a fortnight!”

Bayre laughed as he took a scrutinising look round.

“Is that your beauty?” asked he, as there emerged from among the old houses facing the harbour a girl of the middle height, dressed in a short skirt of coarse blue serge, and a thick jacket of pilot cloth with black horn buttons, with a little tasselled fisher-cap on her head. She moved easily and well in the thick, clumsy boots she wore; and her sparkling eyes, vivid complexion, and dark hair worn in a thick plait tied at the nape of the neck were attributes of an unmistakably pretty girl.

She had a large parcel in her arms, and she was followed by a small boy of the fisher class, who was staggering under half a dozen packages of goodly size.

On she came along the pier, picking her way with easy grace of movement among litter of ship’s lumber and cordage. It was the grace of over-brimming vitality, of youth and the joy of life. Against his will Bayre, too, found her fair.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Southerley, enthusiastically, below his breath.

“She’s good-looking, of course,” admitted Bayre, grudgingly, “but it’s not my type.”

However this might be, he watched her as she came along, though with no such adoration as appeared in his companion’s eyes. With the ingratitude of her sex, however, it was at Bayre and not at Southerley that the girl glanced twice as she passed. And even when she had stopped near the landing-stage and taken her parcels from the boy she threw a third sidelong look at Bayre, a look which showed that for some reason he inspired her with at least a passing interest. Taking out her handkerchief, she waved it to the man in the boat, who took up his oars instead of hoisting a sail, and began slowly to return to the pier.

Once again the girl turned, glanced at Bayre, looked down at her parcels, and seemed to hesitate. Southerley made a step forward, only too anxious for an excuse to offer his assistance to the young beauty. But it was to Bayre she turned, as, apparently taking the offer of the one as the offer of them both, she said, in a bright girl’s voice, speaking in excellent English but with a slight French accent that was piquant and pretty,—

“Oh, thank you so much! If you would say, when the boat comes to the side, that I’ve forgotten something and shall be back directly?”

Bayre murmured his readiness, while Southerley expressed his vociferously. And with a smile and a pretty word of thanks she fled back over the ropes and the spars, the barrels and the fishing-nets, in the direction of the shops.

Southerley was put out that it should have been his companion who received the beauty’s commission. Bayre laughed at him and went to the side of the pier to watch the approaching boat.

It was now near enough for him to discern the face of the hard-featured, elderly man who pulled the oars; and as he looked, as he marked the long, straight chin, the straight upper lip, and the rather long grey hair which showed under the man’s peaked cap, he recognised a certain likeness to his own family, and more especially to his late father, which convinced him that he was in the presence of his uncle, Bartlett Bayre.

With a face full of interest he hung over the side of the pier, watching the boat and its rugged-looking occupant in his oilskins until the old man was only a few feet from the stone wall of the pier.

Then, leaning over, he hailed him with a smile.

“Ho! Do you know me, Uncle Bartlett?”

The man stopped on his oars, looked up quickly, and stared at the young man with the watery blue eyes of age.

Bartlett Bayre was still smiling, still holding his hand out in sign of amity and goodwill. To his surprise, almost to his consternation, there came over the older man’s face, as he looked upwards, an expression of horror and alarm impossible to mistake. His weather-beaten face grew livid, and the pipe, a common clay, suddenly fell from his lips as if it had been bitten in two.

For the space of a few seconds he sat rigid, as if petrified with dismay. The next moment he had turned the boat round with one rapid movement of his right oar, and was rowing out to sea with all his might.

CHAPTER III.
SOMEBODY’S IDEAL

“Uncanny sort of man your uncle!”

Bayre started and looked round. It was Repton who was speaking; he had come up and joined his friends while Bayre was busy with the man in the boat.

“Who says it’s my uncle at all?” said Bayre, sharply.

“Why, you do. You addressed him by that affectionate appellation, though I admit he was not responsive to the appeal.”

Bayre stood up, angry and mortified.

“I made a mistake, of course,” said he. “Being full of this unknown uncle, I was quite ready to take for him the first man who seemed to answer to the description given of him.”

“Then why, if he wasn’t your uncle,” persisted Repton, inquisitively, “did he seem so much put out by your speaking to him? In fact, he seemed more than put out, he looked horror-struck.”

“He took me for a lunatic, I suppose,” said Bayre, uneasily.

“I don’t see why he should. After all, even if you had been a lunatic he could scarcely be afraid of you while he was in the boat and you on the pier!”

“Of course not,” put in Southerley, who had been watching and listening very attentively. “The old man’s Bayre’s uncle sure enough. Why, there’s no mistaking the likeness between them, for one thing. He’s got your long, straight, sharp chin, Bayre, and there’s something indefinable besides, which I take for a family likeness. No, the fact’s plain; he’s your uncle, but he’s in no hurry to acknowledge the relationship.”

“Then,” retorted Bayre, recovering his temper as he perceived a weapon for retaliation to his hand, “if he’s my uncle, the lady who was with him is, of course, the young wife we’ve heard about.”

Both he and Repton burst out laughing on seeing how Southerley’s face fell at the suggestion.

“Rubbish!” he said angrily. “She’s a girl, not a married woman. I’ll take my oath she’s not more than eighteen or nineteen. Besides—besides,” he began to stammer in his agitation, “she—she wore no wedding-ring!”

“Are you sure?”

“Q-q-quite sure. I—I should have noticed it. I noticed everything about her.”

“Then you wasted your time,” said Repton, mischievously, “for what attention she gave to either of you was distinctly given to Bayre. That points again to the man in the boat being his uncle; the lady recognised the type.”

“I don’t know what you can have seen to be so jolly cock-sure as to what she noticed,” remarked Southerley, in a tone of displeasure, “for you were not in sight when she was on the pier.”

“Not in your sight, because your eyes were so precious full of somebody else,” retorted Repton, cheerfully. “But you were in sight of me, anyhow. I was behind that boat.”

And he nodded in the direction of one of the small fishing-boats which had been hauled up on the shore close to the pier, so that the bows, protruding over the stone-work, had afforded a very good hiding-place.

“You must have had very good eyes to discern this intense admiration for Bayre in the lady!” said Southerley, growing loud in his scorn.

“Keep your hair on, Southerley,” said Bayre. “He’s only chaffing you. You can’t suppose the lady felt any more spontaneous admiration for my charms than I did for hers. So you needn’t waste good jealousy upon me which might be useful some other time. She looked at me, if she looked at all, because I looked at her. And I only looked because I wondered what on earth you could find to rave about in a restless, fidgety, excitable-looking girl, who looked as if she couldn’t stand still for two minutes. Depend upon it she’s hysterical, and that she’s the sort of girl to talk your head off: the kind of woman who would get on your nerves after the first ten minutes.”

“Hysterical! She’s no more hysterical than you are!” cried Southerley, in tones less subdued than ever. “You call her hysterical just because she isn’t stodgy, and you prefer stodgy women, like the ass you are!”

Excited by their argument, neither of the three young men had observed that the fair subject of their discussion had come back while it was in progress, and was now standing only a few feet away, where every word they uttered reached her ears with perfect distinctness. It was, of course, Repton, the non-talker, who caught sight of her first; and as, with a glance of horror, he seized Southerley by the arm, she tripped demurely forward, saying, as she came,—

“Stodgy or hysterical, gentlemen, she will be glad if you will let her pass.”

The consternation of the three culprits, especially of the two disputants, was terrible to witness. Southerley’s reddish, open-air complexion became a beautiful beet-root colour, while Bayre’s darker skin assumed a sallow tint which was most unbecoming. At the same time they muttered confused and incoherent apologies, most pitiful to listen to; and Repton, who felt the comparative security of his own position, was the only one in a fit state to offer some intelligible words. Perhaps, however, they were not very well chosen.

“I assure you—believe me, we—that is to say they—were not talking of you, madam,” he said earnestly, stimulated in his zeal for his friends by the delight of knowing that he was the only one of the three sufficiently innocent to address her. For though Southerley had indeed defended her charms, he felt that he had not done it in quite the right way, or in the subdued and refined accents befitting such a theme.

Luckily for them all, the attention of the lady, who received all these apologies with an airy and gracious good-humour but little soothing to their vanity, was speedily distracted by her discovery that the boat with the old man in it was not waiting for her, as she had expected, at the landing-place.

She looked about her with consternation. Southerley sprang to the rescue.

“The er—er—boat— The er—er—er gentleman has gone away—is over there,” said he, pointing to the speck which the two weather-beaten sails of the little boat had now become in the distance.

The young lady looked from the boat to the young men in surprise.

“Why, what have you done? Is it you who have frightened him away?” she asked.

“Not I. If it’s anybody, it’s—it’s Bayre,” said Southerley, bringing out the name with some emphasis, as he indicated his dark-faced companion.

He was prepared for the look which instantly appeared on her face as she repeated to herself the one word, “Bayre!”

And into her eyes there came a strange expression, not the horror which they had seen in the face of the old man in the boat, but a look of interest, of wonder.

Southerley, who knew how to manage a boat—on the Thames, at least—went on eagerly,—

“Will you let me take you out to him? I can hire a boat here, and I know how to manage one. Ask my friends here.”

But the girl smiled and shook her head. Even Bayre acknowledged to himself that she looked very handsome when she smiled, for her teeth were white and even, and the curve of her lips over them was pretty.

“I won’t trouble you to do that, thank you. For that matter, I can manage a boat myself. We all learn to do that when we live on the small islands here.”

All the young men noted this speech, and poor Southerley’s countenance fell again. For it did look as if this beautiful creature must be old Mr Bayre’s young wife: Southerley’s soul revolted at the thought. He persisted in pressing his services. If she would not trust herself with him, at least it would be something if he could show off his prowess before her admiring eyes.

“Then let me go after him,” said he, “and tell him that you’re waiting, tell him to come back.”

She shook her head with a little hesitation.

“I can’t think why he’s gone,” she murmured uneasily.

And then, as if involuntarily, she threw a sidelong look at Bayre.

Southerley seized the occasion of her hesitation, and hailing a boatman, who was busy with a line in a small craft on the water below, he hastily made his bargain; and dispensing, after some argument, with the services of the owner, hoisted the lug sail and started in pursuit of the man with the pipe and the peaked cap. The pretty girl in the fisher cap looked the least little bit disconcerted on perceiving that the broad-shouldered young stranger with the red face and the deep voice was as good as his word. Instead of the admiration with which poor Southerley flattered himself that she was regarding his efforts, she watched him hoist the sail, and, with a slight frown of distress, said, in a low voice,—

“Why did he do it? He’ll be drowned to a certainty! It’s very dangerous to go out here without knowing something of the currents.”

“Oh, he can swim,” said Bayre, with indifference.

And Southerley’s other friend added gallantly,—

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind being drowned while he was doing you a service, mademoiselle.”

“But he isn’t!” said she, slowly, turning upon Repton a pair of wide-open brown eyes. “If you knew old Mr Bayre”—and again she glanced at the young man of that name—“you’d know that it is no service to anybody to try to persuade him to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

His wife, to a certainty! thought Repton, cynically.

But Bayre took a different view.

“Surely your father will come back for you?” he suggested.

The girl answered promptly,—

“Oh, he’s not my father—he’s no relation—at least—”

And there, tantalisingly, she stopped.

For no reason in particular, certainly no reason they could have given in words, both the young men felt relieved.

“I—I beg your pardon,” said Repton. “I might have known you wouldn’t have a father like that.”

Again the girl glanced, rather apprehensively, if rather mischievously, at the other man.

“If I’m not mistaken,” said she, slowly, “he is a relation of yours.”

Then she paused a moment, and seeing a sort of acknowledgment on the young man’s face, she added abruptly,—

“Are you his nephew?”

“I—I believe so.”

She looked at him with a little inclination of the head at this confirmation of the idea she had had about him.

“I thought so,” said she. “You are the son of Mr Richard Bayre, old Mr Bartlett Bayre’s brother, and your portrait, taken when you were a little boy, standing beside your father, is at the château in one of the salons.”

Bayre was at once keenly on the alert.

“Does he—do you happen to know—if my uncle ever speaks of me, madam?” he asked with vivid interest.

“Never,” said she.

And she answered with a look which gave both Bayre and Repton the impression that the old man had a decidedly hostile feeling towards his almost unknown young kinsman.

The uncomfortable feeling created by this impression was strongly increased when, after a short silence, the young girl said abruptly,—

“Are you going back to England soon?”

“Y-y-yes. We have to be back in London in a fortnight,” said Bayre, with a blank look.

“You live in London?” A look of reflection came into her eyes. “Everybody in England seems to live in London!”

“Yes.”

Then Repton, rather troubled that the beautiful girl addressed herself solely to his companion, put in,—

“You know London, of course, mademoiselle?”

There came a sudden flash of something, of eagerness, of longing, of some feeling, vivid but indescribable, into her face as she said simply,—

“I wish I did!”

“It’s an awfully jolly place,” went on Repton, insinuating himself jubilantly into the conversation which Bayre appeared glad to drop out of. “Lots of life, and movement, and bustle, and social enjoyment. And then there’s art—divine art!” and Repton made enthusiastic circles in the air with his right hand, “and the theatres!”

“Ah!—yes!”

It was a sort of sigh that the girl uttered, not looking at him, but vaguely out at the sea with the steady yearning of eyes that see more than the physical objects before them.

Then Bayre put in,—

“London’s a beastly hole, full of fog and smoke and mud, and hurrying people, and jostling ambitions that are never satisfied. As for social enjoyment, it’s a fallacy. People know you there, not as yourself, but as only a tiny part of London and its life. Real friendship, real social enjoyment, real art you get only outside.”

She looked at him with interest.

“I wonder!” she said softly. Then she added, in even a lower tone, “Still, one would like to try!”

Both the young men were silent, interested, too, in the bubbling vitality that wanted some outlet, in the vague, girlish unrest that “wanted to know.”

“In short, if you’re to believe Bayre, London’s a humbug,” said Repton. “But to us artists life and art are everywhere.”

“Are you an artist?” she asked with frank interest. “With a studio, a real studio, where you work?”

Repton smiled at the manner of the question.

“I don’t know about being a real artist,” he said, with a sudden affectation of modesty, “but I have a real studio in Horton Street, Tottenham Court Road, where I paint pictures.”

“That must be nice.” And then, with that persistent interest in Bayre which seemed to his companion so offensive and unnecessary, she turned to him and said, “And are you an artist too?”

“I don’t know,” said he, rather blankly. “If I am, I’m an unsuccessful one. And my medium is not paint and brushes, but pen and ink.”

“Oh, a writer? That’s nice too!”

“It would be nicer,” said he, drily, “if the medium could be print.”

“That will come! That will come! You are not very old.” Then, after an instant’s pause, during which she seemed to be gathering up some lost impressions, she said suddenly, “But I must be thinking of getting back!”

“Won’t you wait for—for the boat?” stammered Repton.

She had already moved a few paces away, but she paused, and said, smiling,—

“Oh, no, I can’t. You will thank your friend for me. I’m sorry he should have taken that trouble.” She turned away, bowing as she did so, but suddenly changed her mind and came back to them. There was a strange thoughtfulness and gravity in her face and manner as she repeated a former question,—

“And you are going back to England—London—soon? In a fortnight?”

Wondering and disconcerted, they both assented. She looked down for a moment, and then raised her head abruptly.

“Would you take a parcel to England—not for me, but to oblige one of my friends?”

“Certainly, of course we would.”

“Only too delighted—”

She cut them short with a smile.

“Thank you, thank you very much. You are very kind. I shall see you again before you go away, then.”

With more smiles, with more bows, she had fled away over the ropes and among the old barrels, and the two young men were left staring at each other, with the excitement of the unusual adventure still upon them.

“By Jove, what a lovely girl!” said Repton, enthusiastically.

“H’m! Lovely girl at asking questions; but we didn’t get much out of her in return,” said his companion, grumpily.

“Well, we couldn’t sit down and put her through her catechism. It was enough for me just to be in the presence of such a handsome creature.”

“Ah!” grumbled Bayre.

“But not for you, you Grimmgriffenhoof?”

“No. I don’t like her.”

But to judge from the way in which he looked at the boat which presently came gliding along under the pier, with two boatmen managing the sails and the pretty girl herself holding the tiller, Bayre’s dislike of her was at least as absorbing an emotion as the frank adoration of his two friends.

CHAPTER IV.
AND SOMEBODY’S AVERSION

There were “ructions” when Southerley got back to the pier, having failed to catch up the boat containing the old man, and having failed also to get a sight of the boat in which the pretty girl had set sail in her turn.

Southerley was inclined to think the conduct of his two friends unneighbourly in the extreme. He felt that it was their business to have detained the lady until his return, though he could not explain how they should have set about it. He felt that he had been shamefully tricked, and he did not get over his mortification and resentment until chance threw in their way, on the following morning, a person able and willing to communicate to them those details concerning old Mr Bayre of Creux which Aurélie had been prevented from imparting to them.

It was a tradesman’s wife in the town, from whom they had bought some small nick-nacks as souvenirs of their holiday, who told them the strange story. Mr Bayre, she said, had lived for many years a bachelor on his little island, with only his starched and penurious old housekeeper, his cousin, Mees Ford, as companion. The château Madame described as a magnificent and even famous mansion, more like a museum than an ordinary house, by reason of the splendid collection of pictures, tapestries, statues and curiosities of all kinds, of which old Mr Bayre was a well-known collector.

Even this was new to Bartlett Bayre the younger, whose knowledge of his uncle’s habits was of the slightest, and whose acquaintance with him had ceased very many years before.

The good woman went on to tell how, on one of the expeditions which old Mr Bayre periodically made in search of more treasures, he had found an unexpected one in the shape of a beautiful young wife, whom he had brought back to Creux and shut up in the dreary château and the still drearier society of himself and Mees Ford.

“Poor thing!” cried Madame, raising her eyes and her hands with a shrug of sympathy, “no wonder that she was dull! This beautiful young creature buried like that in what was little better than a magnificent tomb!”

“And how long ago was this?” asked Bayre.

“A little more than two years, monsieur, since he brought her to Creux, and it is six months since she ran away.”

“Ran away!”

All the young men echoed the words in different keys. It was satisfactory, at any rate, to know that the unknown beauty who had excited so much attention among them was not the ogre’s wife.

“Then who is the young girl—”

The good woman put up her hand and bowed her head, as an intimation that she wished to proceed with her tale her own way. And she again addressed Bayre,—

“She ran away, as well she might; and the only pity is that she was not allowed to take her baby with her!”

“Baby!”

“Yes, messieurs, a charming baby. She ran away with him, and reached the port here with him safely. But Marie Vazon, who had charge of the child, played her false at the last, and left the poor young mother to go alone to England without him. Oh, those Vazons! They are the spies of old M. Bayre; father and daughter they have command of everything for him. And they do say that old M. Bayre and Mees Ford knew what young Madame was going to do, and that, like the selfish old people they were, they rejoiced to get rid of her. As for the baby, it is left to Marie Vazon at the farm. A pretty nurse, ma foi!”

And Madame raised her eyebrows with a significant look.

Again Southerley’s voice broke in. All this information about wives and babies might be very exciting for Bayre, whose chances of being his uncle’s heir were thus destroyed, but compared with the great subject, that of the glorious girl in the fisher cap, it was positively tedious.

“But who is the handsome girl with the long brown hair—” he began again persistently.

Madame turned to him with a smile.

“Ah! She will not be buried in the tomb-like château any longer,” she said archly. “Mees Eden is a ward of old M. Bayre’s, and she is going to be married to a gentleman of the island—of this island, I mean.”

Southerley gave a groan. But Repton drew himself up.

“Tell me his name that I may go and shoot him,” he said valiantly. “The islands are all very well, but if you’ll forgive my saying so, Madame, the lady is too handsome for so confined a sphere: we have already decided that she must come to England—in fact, that she must marry one of us.”

Madame burst out laughing.

“Ah, you are not the only young gentleman to feel like that about Mees Eden,” she said. “But M. Bayre he has French ideas about his ward, and he chooses to marry her to a staid, middle-aged man like himself rather than to a hot-headed young fellow about whom he could not feel so sure.”

“But that bright-eyed girl would never let herself be handed over like a parcel of currants to a man she didn’t care about—a middle-aged man too!” cried Repton.

“Ah! I cannot say, but I think it is so,” said Madame. “Although Mees Eden is the daughter of an Englishman, a very old friend of M. Bayre’s, her mother was a French lady, and she has been brought up at a school in France. I think she will do as French girls do: they have spirit, but they are obedient; and why should she not do as her mother did before her?”

“She must be so dull at Creux,” said Southerley, thoughtfully, “that I suppose she would do anything for a change.”

“How long has she been here?” asked Bayre, breaking in rather suddenly and rather imperiously upon the lighter tones of the rest.

“Only a few months. It was after his wife had run away that M. Bayre sent for her from her school. And then, while she could not get to Creux by reason of the gales and the stormy weather, his old cousin died. It was a dreadful business, for the weather was too rough for her body to be brought over for burial here, and—”

“I know,” interrupted Repton. “They told us. It was washed away.”

Madame nodded.

“Yes. It was a dreadful business. Old M. Bayre has never been quite the same man since. You see the one shock came close upon the other. Even if he did not care much for his wife, we must suppose her running away to have had some effect upon him. And though he and Mees Ford used to quarrel, still he had been used to her for long years, and doubtless he felt her death deeply. Now he shuts himself up more than ever, and he never goes away to London or to Paris as he used to do. And when strangers come to see his collection they never see him.”

“Oh, we can see his collection, then?” said Repton, with interest.

“Oh, yes. It is his great pride to let strangers see it. Formerly he or his housekeeper would show them through the rooms, but now it is a servant who leads visitors through them.”

The young men looked at each other.

“We’ll go over to-morrow,” said Southerley.

Bayre assented, but with a grave and pre-occupied air. The whole tale was a weird one, and concerning his own family as it did, it gave him food for reflection.

When, therefore, on the following day, they engaged a couple of boatmen to take them over to Creux—for Southerley did not offer to repeat his experience of navigating the channel himself—Bayre remained moody and thoughtful in the bows while his companions were chatty and cheerful in the stern.

It was one of those bright and sunny days of which January generally gives us a few as a set-off against the asperities of the February and March which must inevitably follow; the first view of the steep and rocky coast of Creux, with its fringe of jagged rocks, picturesque to see but dangerous to negotiate, was striking and impressive. The cliffs, of black and white granite, rose sheer out of the water, broken and eaten away in many places into deep ravines, where a softening growth of brown ferns made beautiful the entrance to shadowy caverns in the rock.

Outside the cliffs many a jagged pinnacle of the granite shot up its points from a little base of foam into the air, with seabirds circling round its summit and a soft plash-plash beating against its sides.

Nothing could be seen at first approach beyond the rocks and the steep cliff; but presently the travellers, struck dumb with appreciation of the picturesque, found themselves approaching a poor sort of little pier, close by which a small house, with a man in fisherman’s jersey lolling in front of it, gave the first sign of human presence on the island.

With some difficulty the boat was made fast and the three young men scrambled ashore. A climb of a few minutes brought them to the top of the cliff, and thence it was but a short quarter of a mile to the famous château, which, half hidden by almost the only clump of trees on the island, proved to be a long and very unimposing stone dwelling, large, straggling, and evidently built with an eye rather to use than to beauty.

On their way the travellers passed a small farmhouse, where a man of age difficult to fix, with greyish hair and clad in a blouse, saluted them and watched them with furtive eyes as they made their way towards the house. He was a very unprepossessing person, with small eyes set close together, and with the wrinkles of cunning and of avarice on his weatherbeaten face.

The unimposing entrance to the château was by a small courtyard, on the other side of which was a pleasant garden in which, in the summer, fruit and flowers, vegetables and sweet herbs, grew side by side.

A ring at the bell, the clang of which they heard echoing through the old house, brought to the door a woman of the peasant type, quite young, probably, and not ill-looking of feature, but with sly blue eyes and thick lips, and a furtive expression. She was dressed rather in the simple farmhouse costume than in that of the usual servants of a country house, and wore the round, close cap which is so generally becoming.

On making known their wish to see the treasures of M. Bayre’s collection, they were at once admitted by her into a plain-looking hall, where they inscribed their names in a large book which lay, with pens and ink, upon a table at one end.

While they were doing this they heard certain sounds in a little gallery above them, which informed them that they were observed from that quarter; and suddenly the girl looked up, and, as if obeying a signal, begged the gentlemen to excuse her one moment, ran up the staircase and for a moment disappeared.

When she came hurriedly down again, after an absence of a few seconds only, she was red and shy. Stammering out her excuses, she said that only two persons could be shown through the mansion at one time, and singling out Repton and Southerley, she opened a door on her left hand and showed them in, while she beckoned to the mortified Bayre to follow her to the door by which he had entered.

“Oh, come, I say! We don’t want to go in unless we can all go,” cried Repton, in astonishment.

But Bayre, who understood that his uncle meant to forbid him, and him alone, the house, waved his hand in token that they were to go without him, and hurried, without a word, out of the house.

He was in a tumult of irritated feeling. As he threw one glance up at the windows of the mansion which was so undeservedly closed to him, he caught sight of the face of Miss Eden, pale and constrained, looking out. Most unreasonably he at once decided that this girl had somehow had a hand in his discomfiture, and it was with a feeling of fierce dislike—or at least he thought it was—and of defiance that he raised his hat to her and at once dashed into the avenue and disappeared from her sight.

He could not understand the effect the sight of this girl had upon him. If he had felt irritated before at his uncle’s refusal to allow him to enter his house, that feeling was as nothing to the burning indignation he experienced at the thought that this bit of a girl, this restless, hysterical, fidgety girl, as he had, in his utter ignorance, called her, should have been a witness of the gross outrage which had just been put upon him.

It was in vain he told himself that he did not care what she saw or what she thought, that she was a capricious, malicious creature who had herself urged his uncle not to have anything to do with him.

He could not forget her face; he could not get over his annoyance. As he walked out from under the avenue trees into the winter sunshine he felt as if unseen eyes were upon him, as if undiscoverable throats were muttering hoarse laughter from the shelter of the brambles and the dead ferns that he passed.

But these fancies presently grew into the knowledge that he was indeed being watched, not by an unseen elfish being, but by the morose-looking man in blouse and peaked cap whom they had passed at the farmhouse. And, discovering suddenly a likeness between this individual and the girl who had opened the door of the mansion, Bayre had no difficulty in deciding that they were father and daughter, and guessed that these were the two people of whom he had heard—the rulers of the island under his uncle, the spies, Vazon and his daughter Marie.

Bayre had an uncomfortable feeling that this man knew of the slight which had been put upon him, and that he had been told off to watch him until he should have left the island. Full of fury as this suspicion crossed his mind, the young man resolved not to linger about for his friends but to return at once to the boat and to wait for them there.

He was, however, drawn aside by the beauty of a singular natural curiosity which came in his way when he drew near the coast, one of those strange, funnel-like openings down through the cliffs to the sea which are such a feature of these islands. Peering down the wide opening through the green growth and dead bracken which formed a graceful fringe around the opening, Bayre was fascinated by the long dark vista, and by the sight and the sound of the incoming tide dashing little waves of feathery foam against the funnel’s sides.

As he looked, holding his pipe in one hand and his pouch in the other, more with a wish to seem to be light-hearted than because he felt a longing to smoke, he was startled by a girl’s voice behind him.

It was a soft voice, a sweet voice; there was no getting away from that fact. Nevertheless it was the voice of the “hysterical, restless, fidgety” girl.

“Oh, Mr Bayre, I’m so very, very sorry!”

And turning round so quickly that he narrowly missed precipitating himself through the funnel into the water below, Bayre saw Miss Eden, her fisher cap on her head, her jacket, hastily put on, open, and her eyes brighter, more beautiful than ever.

He tried to feel that he loathed her, but it was a hard task.

CHAPTER V.
WAS IT AVERSION?

Bayre tried to look as if he did not understand what it was that the pretty girl was sorry for. But Miss Eden made short work of his pretended ignorance by saying gently,—

“I have an idea about your uncle; it is an idea formed upon his treatment of me and it seems to be consistent with his treatment of you. Although he sent for me himself from the school where I was, and wrote me a nice letter implying that he and his cousin were lonely and that they would be glad to have me, yet now I’m here he seems to avoid me as much as he can. And now, you see, when he knows that his nephew is here—for that he recognised you as his nephew I am pretty sure from something he said—why, he avoids you too.”

Bayre made an attempt at a haughty smile.

“Oh, if he thinks I mind that he won’t let me see over his collection he’s mistaken. And if he thinks I feel a greater interest in it than any outsider would do he is mistaken again. I’ve never wished to obtrude upon my uncle’s seclusion; I never have obtruded upon it. And if my curiosity as a visiting tourist is at all disappointed, I am more than compensated by the satisfaction I feel that I have always been independent of relations who seem to be devoid of the ordinary instincts of humanity.”

Over Miss Eden’s pretty face there came a slightly puzzled look.

“I don’t say it’s unnatural in the circumstances, but I think you’re too hard,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve always said to myself about Mr Bayre, when he has been more than usually brusque in his manner to me. It is this: Is it fair to judge a man directly after he has experienced two great shocks? I dare say you know all about them, what happened in the case of his wife, and then in that of his cousin. Just think of it,” went on the girl, warmly, her face lighting up with generous emotion, her voice deep, and low, and thrilling; “to lose them both, one after the other, within a few weeks!”

“Was he quite without blame?” asked Bayre, quickly. “To judge by what I have seen of him it’s not likely.”

“What have you seen?” retorted Miss Eden. “Nothing. Less than nothing. He hasn’t even spoken to you!”

Bayre laughed rather grimly.

“Exactly. A gentleman who shows such marked amiability to a kinsman would be the sort of person to treat others in the same way.”

She shook her head slowly.

“From what I’ve heard,” she said with conviction, “he must have been very different before those two things happened. To begin with, he was very generous. If the poor in the islands wanted help he was always the first to give it. Now he is soured, changed, I admit; he seems stunned by his misfortunes, and he shuts himself up to brood upon them. But I believe that this mood will pass; give him another six months and I believe he will be his old self again. At least, I hope so. At present he is suffering from two blows to his affections, and he seems afraid, positively afraid to trust himself to love anybody else.”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t want him to love me,” said Bayre in an off-hand tone.

“No, it doesn’t matter to you, of course, because your life is spent away from him,” said the girl, rather ruefully. “But it does to others, to me, and to—to others besides me.”

And a still graver look passed over her face.

Bayre looked at her and softened in spite of himself.

“Of course it does,” said he, almost humbly. “It must make a very great difference to you. In fact, I can’t understand how you manage to exist in such utter loneliness as you describe.”

The girl gave a sort of sigh, which she immediately turned into a laugh.

“Well, I don’t suppose I shall have to endure it for long. In the meantime it’s such a pleasant change, after the strict school-hours I’ve been accustomed to, to get up when I like, to read as much as I like, to walk, row, sail, bathe just when I like, that I haven’t found life pall upon me one bit. Whether I should get tired of it if I had nothing else to look forward to I don’t know; I suppose I should grow restless and discontented. But at present I can’t say that I’m suffering tortures on account of the touch of Robinson Crusoeism that there is in my existence.”

Of course she was not. Bayre glanced at her and understood perfectly the feeling of freedom after restraint which this live, this brilliant creature, quivering with vitality, must enjoy in the easy, open-air life she described: even her reading, he thought to himself, would be done for the most part out of doors, with the fresh breeze from the sea blowing upon her young face, the salt spray helping to curl into graceful little tendrils the loose strands of brown hair which escaped from the confinement of the black ribbon at the nape of her neck.

“What do you read? Novels, I suppose?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.

And the moment he had uttered the words he felt that they were an impertinence. What right had he to question her upon her habits and tastes? She blushed a little, and he had begun to stammer a kind of apology when she waved away his words and said frankly,—

“Novels! Yes. I’m afraid it is chiefly novels. But I’ve read Carlyle’s French Revolution, and liked it too!” she added, with a certain rather comical pride.

“That was indeed most meritorious on your part,” said Bayre, with mock gravity, feeling the oddest conflict within him between his avowed tastes and the strong and strange attraction this girl had for him.

Strange, because it was more than the ordinary admiration which a young man feels for a beautiful girl. Now that he saw more of her he felt drawn by a sort of magnetic attraction in her sparkling eyes, something which made him inquisitive to read into the depths of that bright young soul, something that told him, much more plainly than did her words, that she was no ordinary pretty girl, but that she had a nature which could feel and a head which could think.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” she replied, laughing again. “But when a man talks of novels there is always a suggestion in his words that they are beneath him, at all events.”

“I am not in a position to say that they’re beneath me,” said Bayre. “I want to write them. Indeed, if the truth were told—”

“You’ve written one already? Well, so have I!”

“Ah!”

There was a certain inevitable tone of indulgence in this exclamation which made the girl redden.

“Why do you say ‘Ah!’ like that?”

“Did I say it offensively?” said Bayre, smiling at last.

“I won’t go so far as to say that; but you said it in a tone which implied—well, I think it implied that you could not expect much from my performance.”

“If my tone said all that I apologise humbly. And yet, no, on second thoughts I don’t apologise. For after all, what could there be in a novel by a young girl just out of school, who knows nothing whatever of life beyond the four walls of her schoolroom?”

“But one can imagine, even if one doesn’t know.”

There was an indescribable spirit and impulse under these words which made the young man look at her curiously.

“Yes, yes, but imagination is not of much value unless it has something to go upon. It is of no more value than a painting done by a man who had never seen anything but his paint-box. You must study Nature, copy Nature, before your imagination is of any use to you!”

“Ah! Now you go too far,” cried she, warmly, “for it is of use, even if it only serves to make the world look more pleasant than it really is.”

“I don’t call that a use, I call it a danger,” said Bayre, now quite as warm as she in his argument. “Supposing, for instance, you start by endowing with all the gifts of your imagination some commonplace person whom, upon that and that alone, you resolve to marry, would your imagination be strong enough, do you think, to enable you to gild your bargain to the end?”

She blushed a rosy red and looked at him half angrily, half mischievously, with a quick glance.

“Is a man the worse for being commonplace?” she asked. “And is it likely that I, who, as you say, know nothing of the world and the people in it, should ever be able to start on a voyage of discovery in search of the man that isn’t commonplace?”

Bayre laughed. And he thought, rather guiltily, of his own avowed ideals, which were very much the same as hers. And at the same moment it flashed through his mind that these same ideals were unsatisfying in his case; it followed, therefore, that they must be proved to be so in her case also.

“Look here,” said he, “I’m not going to dispute that many high qualities, or let us say many serviceable qualities, may be found in those people whom it’s usual to call commonplace, people with no imagination, no ideas; but you, with your romantic tendencies—”

“How do you know I have romantic tendencies?”

Bayre answered, after a pause, that it was because she read novels and wanted to write them. But it occurred to him, even as he said this, that the real reason for his opinion was that he saw romance sparkling in her eyes, emanating from her, encircling her. She was a figure of romance in herself. Frank, sympathetic, impulsive, imaginative, brimming over with the joy of life, she was the very incarnation of healthy, joyous, budding womanhood, of the womanhood that looks out with eyes full of vague golden hope at the future, and that lives meanwhile in almost ecstatic joy in the present.

“Well,” said she, with a happy smile, “surely it’s rather a shrewd arrangement to use up one’s romantic tendencies by reading novels, and perhaps even by writing them, so that they mayn’t interfere with the prosaic course of one’s actual life.”

“Is actual life prosaic to you?” said Bayre. “A young girl shut up in a lonely and gloomy house with an old guardian who hardly ever speaks to her! I never heard of a less prosaic situation in my life.”

“Ah, well, the prose is to come,” said she, lightly. “Your uncle is very anxious to get me off his hands, and he is to introduce to me to-morrow a certain neighbour of his who, it seems, has been struck by my charms, and who proposes humbly to solicit the honour of my fair hand.”

The girl said this with the most delicious mixture of mischievous amusement and girlish shyness, blushing and looking away, while at the same time her eyes danced with fun and her lips were curved into a smile. Bayre was stupefied, indignant.

He had not the least reason to be, of course.

“And you mean to say that you’re going to let yourself be married off to a man you care no more for than that?” he asked quite sharply.

“I don’t know whether I care for him; I’ve never seen him yet.”

“Never—seen him!”

“At least, not to my knowledge. As he has seen me it’s possible I may recognise his face when he’s formally introduced to me. He lives at Guernsey, and I’m often over there.”

“And do you really think any happiness could come of a marriage arranged like that?—in that cold-blooded fashion?” asked Bayre, warmly.

The girl blushed a deep red.

“My mother was a Frenchwoman,” she answered simply. “And if you know anything of France you must know that there it is not customary for girls to have so much freedom of choice as in England.”

“But you’re English—your father was an Englishman,” said Bayre, warmly. And then a bright thought struck him: “you see I, being your guardian’s nephew, may be looked upon as a sort of relation of yours—”

“Oh, no,” cried Miss Eden, rippling with smiles.

“Yes, indeed,” persisted Bayre, emphatically. “My uncle is nothing but an old fossil, who knows little more of the world than you do yourself. I begin to see that it’s nothing less than my duty to bring my own greater knowledge and experience to bear upon this matter. In short, if your guardian won’t do his duty and exercise a proper discretion on your behalf, I shall have to do it for him, and, and—”

“And choose a husband for me?” asked Miss Eden, in the most solemn and demure tone, the while her bright eyes flashed with the humour of the thing.

“Exactly,” replied Bayre, as solemnly as she, while his eyes looked into hers, seeing the roguery in them and answering it with mischief in his own.

By this time both were bubbling over with suppressed laughter, enjoying intensely this huge joke of his vague relationship and assumed authority. Bayre’s disappointment and irritation at his uncle’s snub were both forgotten. Miss Eden had forgotten, too, that her errand in meeting the young man had been one of benevolent sympathy and consolation. They had wandered together away from the opening in the cliff and downwards among the dead fern and brambles towards the shore. Bayre had had to help her, now and then, with a strong hand holding hers as they stepped over loose stones and thorny clumps of bush and bramble. It was pleasant, exciting, this aimless ramble in the winter sunlight, with the sea breeze blowing in their faces and the splash of the waves in their ears.

And then, suddenly, there broke upon them a sound less pleasant, because it called them back to life and prose. This was the voice of Repton calling to Bayre by name. The young man stood still and looked round. Neither Repton nor Southerley was in sight yet, but a glimpse of an old blue blouse and of a crouching back behind a clump of bushes at the top of the cliff showed that the idyllic promenade of the two young people had not been unobserved.

Miss Eden saw the blouse at the same moment, and she frowned angrily.

“There’s that old spy, Pierre Vazon,” cried she. “Nothing that happens here escapes the eyes of him or his daughter. They’re a pair of ignorant, cunning peasants of the lowest type, and I hate them both.”

“Is that his daughter who opened the door of my uncle’s house to us?”

“Yes. She rules everything indoors and her father everything out.”

“The man has a horrible face, and I don’t like the woman’s much better,” said Bayre. “Does my uncle like these people?”

Miss Eden hesitated.

“I sometimes think,” said she, “that—that he’s afraid of them.”

“Afraid! Why should he be?”

“I—don’t—know.” Before Bayre could ask another question the voices of his two friends, still shouting to him, were heard again from above; and the girl, whose manner had changed since the interruption, gave a glance up towards the spot where the peasant was watching, and leapt down towards the shore, away from her companion. “Your friends are calling you, Mr Bayre. Good-bye,” she said, as, with a little inclination of the head, she disappeared in the direction of one of the caverns with which the cliffs were honeycombed.

CHAPTER VI.
A BOLT FROM THE BLUE

Bayre stood for a few moments where she had left him, his mind full of a strange idea suggested by some of her latest words.

His uncle was afraid of the Vazons. Why?

That she had meant to imply something more than a mere idle fancy he knew perfectly well. This fear of the peasant and his daughter on the part of their master and employer had its origin in something stronger than mere prejudice or timidity: so much he felt sure of, so much had the girl’s look and tone implied.

And involuntarily the young man’s thoughts flew back to that strange story of the death of Miss Ford, and of its tragic sequel. Ugly fancies invaded his mind, connecting themselves with his uncle’s strange reluctance to meet him and with these fears of his own servants of which he had just heard.

He was quite glad when the voices of Repton and Southerley, bawling his name in louder tones than before, broke in upon his unpleasant thoughts and at last elicited from him an answering cry.

In a few moments they had met and were making their way together back to the boat.

Repton and Southerley were full of regrets that Bayre had not been with them during their visit to the house, the treasures of which they described with a voluble enthusiasm which, as they both spoke at once, and each described a different room at the same time, produced upon their companion rather a vague sense of magnificence.

“He’s got one of the finest Murillos I ever saw, and an undoubted Rubens, which the National Gallery would give a fortune for,” said Repton.

“Some of the tapestries and china are A1,” said Southerley, talking through Repton’s speech. “And he’s got some old French furniture as good as any in Hertford House.”

“It was an infernal shame, Bayre, that they wouldn’t let you in too,” said Repton. “But perhaps he thought you might be too anxious to claim the rights of kinship when you saw the treasures he’d got.”

“Oh, well, I’d just as soon hear about them as see them,” said Bayre, philosophically. “After all, perhaps there would have been a temptation for me to help myself to a few souvenirs of dear Nunky in the way of portable property.”

His friends, having parted from him when he was in a gloomy and savage condition, were quite surprised to see how completely he had got over his disappointment. They went on condoling with him with a lighter heart.

“It was too bad that you should be condemned to a lonely stroll outside while we were rioting in luxury inside,” said Southerley.

Bayre did not undeceive them. He lit his pipe, which he had been holding unlighted in his hand, settled himself comfortably in the bow of the boat, and gave himself up to thoughts in which neither his friends nor his uncle had any share; and while the other two babbled of their visit to the mansion, and talked imperfect French to the boatmen, both of whom understood every word they said in English, the artful Bayre caught a thrilling glimpse of a white pocket-handkerchief fluttering against a background of cavernous darkness, away under the cliff behind them. Taking off his cap he waved it in the air, a proceeding which caused both Repton and Southerley to turn their heads shorewards with much suddenness.

But they saw nothing, and the rascal in the bows refused to acknowledge that he had seen anything either. A lingering mistrust of him glowed darkly in the eyes of the other two for a little while, but he kept his own counsel, and they could get nothing out of him.

It was two days after this that they all came face to face with another party of three persons in one of the streets in the upper town.

One of these persons was old Mr Bayre, dressed as before in serge trousers and pilot coat, with a pipe between his teeth and his yachting cap drawn well over his eyes. His hands were in his pockets, and he walked along with bent head and shuffling step, and without exchanging a word with his two companions. One of these was a stout Frenchman of middle age, whose round, pink, flabby face was garnished by a huge double chin, and furthermore set off by a pair of blue glasses, which helped, with the big Panama hat he wore, to give him a strange and most unattractive appearance.

The third member of the party was pretty Miss Eden, and on her face there was such a look of subdued dismay that Bartlett Bayre jumped instantly to the conclusion that the stout gentleman in the goggles was the husband chosen for her by her guardian.

Bayre started forward, on meeting the three, with the intention of forcing his uncle into conversation. Vague ideas of remonstrance, not only with his uncle’s treatment of himself but with his treatment of this girl, filled the young man’s mind.

But the wily old recluse was more than a match for him. Before his nephew could traverse the dozen yards that lay between them, Bartlett Bayre, senior, had turned on his heel and disappeared down a turning, where he was able to hide himself within some friendly neighbour’s door.

When Bayre, junior, came back, disappointed, from a vain pursuit, both Miss Eden and the owner of the Panama hat were out of sight.

Restless, excited, moved out of himself by emotions he could scarcely analyse, Bayre was irritated beyond endurance by the talk of his two friends, who had both conceived the same opinion, that the stout gentleman in the goggles must be the pretty girl’s intended husband.

“It’s outrageous, preposterous, impossible!” Repton was bawling, with the light-hearted enthusiasm of an irresponsible person, as Bayre came up. “Of course, such a thing is not to be endured. What! Marry that lovely girl with the creamy skin to an old effigy with a great pink roll at the back of his neck! A wholly hideous and unpaintable person! Perish the thought!”

“She must be rescued undoubtedly,” assented Southerley. “The only question is how to set about it?”

“Oh, there’s one other thing—Who’s to set about it?” said Repton, firmly. “Shall it be you or I?”

“Or shall we let her have her choice, eh, Repton? I don’t mind doing that, because I feel sure she’ll choose me. No girl with those eyes would look twice at a fellow with sandy hair.”

“Perhaps she won’t care for a red face either,” retorted the artist, calmly. “Bayre, what do you say to entering the lists? Some girls like a sallow face and lank hair without any gloss on it.”

“Some people don’t like a pair of tom-fools,” replied Bayre, savagely. “What does it matter to you whom Miss Eden marries? Mind your own business and don’t bawl people’s names out so that everyone for a mile round can hear the stuff you’re talking.”

“Keep your hair on, my dear friend,” said Repton, with annoying calmness. “If Miss Eden’s nothing to us, she’s nothing to you either, you know. Even if you were serious about her it’s not likely your uncle would entertain you for a suitor when he won’t even allow you inside his doors.”

Bayre turned livid, but said nothing. He did not, indeed, trust himself to speak.

But that very afternoon, stealing out of the house quietly, while his friends were smoking in the little salon, he hired a boat and set sail for the island of Creux.

He meant to see Miss Eden if he died for it. Perhaps some rags of pretence still hung about his mind as to the reason of the interest he took in the beautiful girl. But if so, they fell away and left the bare truth for him to face when, coming upon the girl suddenly in a cleft of the cliff as he went upwards on landing, he found that the unexpected meeting sent the blood flying to his head with a force which made him giddy.

For a moment he said nothing, and, strange to say, the girl was silent also.

“Well?” said she at last.

She was changed since he had seen her last. The colour had left her cheeks, and though her eyes were as bright as ever it was with a different brightness: they seemed to glitter, so he fancied, with unshed tears. And she had not even the conventional smile of greeting for him, but let the one word drop from her lips in a rather husky and tremulous voice, almost, so he thought, as if she felt sure that he guessed the reason of her sadness.

“I—I wanted to see you again,” stammered he at last. “I came—I came—to—to see you.”

He was ashamed of himself. Anything more lame, more clumsy, than these words it was impossible to imagine. But Miss Eden took them quite simply.

“Why did you want to see me?” she asked quickly.

“I—I couldn’t speak to you this morning. And I thought perhaps—perhaps you would think it odd.”

He was floundering hopelessly. Why should she think it odd? he asked himself with rage at his own lack of words, of ideas. But again she lifted him out of his embarrassment by saying,—

“I thought you wanted to speak to your uncle, not to me.”

“I wanted to, but I missed him; or rather, he ran away from me.”

“Ah!”

Their eyes met. And he saw that she, as well as he, thought this shyness on the part of the old recluse mysterious and suspicious.

“Why should he avoid me?”

The girl shook her head.

“Why does he avoid everybody?” she said.

The words raised Bayre’s uneasiness to fever pitch.

“I don’t like to think of your being here all by yourself with those two wretched peasants and an indifferent guardian,” he began impetuously.

He had almost said “a guilty guardian,” but had fortunately checked himself in time.

“Oh, well, I sha’n’t be here long,” she answered, and her face became more sombre as she spoke.

“That man—who was with you yesterday. Surely he—he was not—is not—” stammered Bayre, reddening as he put the mutilated fragment of a question.

She nodded gloomily.

“Yes,” said she, looking away from him and shivering slightly. “That is Monsieur Blaise, whom my guardian has chosen as my husband.”

“But you will never marry him—you?”

She frowned petulantly.

“Oh, how can I tell? I suppose so,” she said.

“You will be miserable!”

“Shall I? I don’t know. Can anybody ever tell those things? No doubt he is a good man, and my guardian is anxious, very anxious, for my marriage.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To get rid of me, I suppose!”

“I can’t understand you,” broke out Bayre, almost passionately. “You seem a girl of spirit, of resource, yet you can calmly submit to be disposed of, by a guardian who doesn’t care for you, to a man whom you don’t care for—”

“How do you know that?”

She turned upon him with a pretty flash of defiance.

But he waved aside the suggested protest.

“As if you could!” said he, not guessing how absurdly eager and anxious he was showing himself in this business which was none of his.

Miss Eden twisted her pretty mouth into a little grimace.

“He’s not exactly the ideal of one’s dreams, perhaps!” she said under her breath.

Whereat Bayre, grown bolder, laughed outright.

“You won’t do it?” he said, becoming suddenly grave.

But she would not give him a direct answer.

“There are many things to be considered,” was her vague reply.

He stood before her, pulling the long ends of his ragged moustache, fighting with a hundred impulses, not one of which had any sort of reason or logic to recommend it. He was interested in this girl, preposterously interested, considering how far removed she was from the type which he had always supposed himself to admire the most. If he had been well off, if even he had been anything but the struggling poor devil of a beginner at life that he was, he knew that he should have cast discretion, common sense to the winds, and that he should have asked her to marry him—him, Bartlett Bayre, hater of spirited woman, and worshipper at the shrine of placid, purring womanhood without a word to say for itself.

As it was, however, that madness was not possible to him. He could not offer to take a girl reared in luxury, as he presumed she was, to share a London garret with him. But the wish, the impulse that prompted this mad thought shone in his eyes, and probably communicated itself to Miss Eden, who blushed when she looked at him, and gave a glance round, preparatory to running away.

“So you’ve come by yourself to-day,” she remarked, turning the conversation as she caught sight of the boat waiting for him.

“Yes. I wanted to see you before—before going away.”

Her manner became thoughtful again.

“When do you go?” said she.

“In four days.”

“Back to London?”

“Yes. I wish—is it too much to ask?—would you send me two lines—no more—for the sake of our half-relationship, you know, just to tell me, to tell me—”

He was so eager that he could not make himself very clear. But she guessed his meaning and smiled gravely.

“Not for the sake of our relationship, which is not very clearly made out, I think, but for the sake of your— Well, never mind of what—perhaps you shall hear of or from me again—some day. What is your address?”

“May I write it down?”

“I shall remember it.”

He gave her the address, and she listened in silence, with her eyes fixed intently on the sea. Then she said quickly, as if struck with a sudden thought of deep import,—

“Thank you. I must go now. If Pierre Vazon were to see me talking to you again he would make mischief—at least, he might. I don’t trust him. Good-bye.”

She held out her hand quickly; he pressed it one moment in his, with a thrill which communicated itself perhaps to her. She blushed a rosy red and drew her fingers sharply away.

“Good-bye,” she said again.

And she was gone.

Bayre went back to the boat in a sort of fever. It cut him to the heart to think that this beautiful, bright girl, who affected him so strangely, should be in danger of becoming the wife of that commonplace Monsieur Blaise, with the roll of pink flesh at the back of his neck and the Panama hat and the blue glasses.

When he got back to his friends they were cool, sarcastic, courteous. It was a bad sign when they were courteous!

But they made friends again over an odd discovery. They ran against the beautiful Miss Eden that evening coming out of the telegraph office; and although they had no chance of so much as an exchange of greetings with her, the incident gave them something to talk about which it was imperative to discuss together.

They saw no more of the beauty before their holiday was over, and it was only too plain that she had forgotten the commission with which she had offered to entrust them.

When the last day of their stay arrived, and they piled their light luggage on one of the deck seats of the boat, with a melancholy feeling that the jolly time was over, they perceived a rough-looking peasant girl, in sabots, and bearing what looked like a fish-basket under her arm, standing on the quay looking down upon them.

Presently she came on board, but as she did not come near the spot where the three young men stood chatting and smoking, they took no particular notice of her movements until the boat started, when they saw her again on the quay-side, this time without her burden.

The morning was keen and cold, and there was a grey mist hanging over the water. They had not steamed far on their way when Repton shivered and returned to their light luggage to put on his overcoat.

He had scarcely reached the pile, however, when a loud exclamation burst from his lips and attracted the attention of his two friends. Turning their heads, they saw him bending over something which had been placed among their things but which did not belong to them.

A second look convinced them that this addition to their luggage was nothing less than the fish-basket which the peasant girl had brought on board. And a third and closer look, when they had obeyed Repton’s signal of alarm and joined him, showed them that the contents of the basket were alive.

“It’s—it’s a child! A—live—child!” gasped Repton, hoarsely.

And the consternation he felt was reflected on the faces of Southerley and Bayre.

CHAPTER VII.
SOMEBODY’S LUGGAGE

There was no doubt about it; there, in the very middle of their pile of light luggage, some of which had been carefully displaced to make room for it, the three young men found the substantial basket they had last seen under the arm of the peasant girl on the quay; and in the basket, lightly covered over by a dark woollen shawl, through the meshes of which it could breathe perfectly well, was a live child.

Repton had moved the shawl, on seeing something move underneath, just far enough back to disclose the tiny face of a healthy-looking infant, some fifteen to eighteen months old, who, just waking from sleep, was staring up at the strangers with its face puckered in readiness for a good cry.

Repton was the first to ascertain this fact, and his increased consternation took a murderous form.

“Let’s chuck it overboard!” cried he, with ferocity.

“Give it to the stewardess,” suggested Southerley, more humanely.

Bayre, meanwhile, with presence of mind amounting to genius, had dashed forward, and seizing an indiarubber tube attached to a boat-shaped bottle containing some opaque fluid which lay beside the child, had thrust it into the infant’s mouth and thereby checked the utterance of its very first scream.

His friends looked at him in admiration, but the little group of passengers and ship’s hands who had been attracted by the commotion looked with more derision than sympathy upon the heroic fellow as he made further investigations into this alarming article of luggage.

“It’s not a peasant’s child,” he said, when he had noted the quality of the baby’s clothes.

He had an idea in his head which he found it hard to get rid of. His uncle had a child, and that child had been kidnapped from the mother when she ran away from her husband, and had been left to the tender care of the Vazons. As far as he could judge, his uncle’s child would be of about the same age as the infant in the basket. Could it be that this small pink and white thing which had been so mysteriously planted upon them was his own first cousin? And was it by some device of Miss Eden’s, who mistrusted the Vazons, that the infant had been thus entrusted to the care of himself and his companions?

While the chatter and the chaff went on round about him, Bayre debated thus within himself, carefully examining the face of the now placid and contented infant with a scrutinising care which sent a ripple of more or less subdued laughter round the group.

“Look here, you fellows, this child has not been dumped down here by accident,” said he, with a gravity which, instead of subduing them into attention, sent them into fits of renewed laughter. “I’m pretty sure we shall find upon it some intimation as to what we have got to do with it.”

“I recommend,” said Southerley, “that we put it in the captain’s care to take back with him to Guernsey.”

“That’s it,” said Repton. “And in the meantime we’ll just find out who it is that has played us this trick. That girl who brought it on board must certainly have been known either to the captain or to some of the crew, and can easily be found by them.”

It was remarkable, however, that, even as he made this suggestion, the curious group that had gathered round began to melt away; and Bayre was not surprised to find, upon inquiry, that nobody on board knew anything about the peasant girl, but that all who had seen her professed to have supposed that she was bringing some luggage belonging to one of the passengers in the ordinary way.

To consternation, to amusement, there succeeded indignation in the minds of both Repton and Southerley at the trick which had been played upon them. They had been made the laughing-stock of everybody on board, and they could find no one to help them out of the mess.

Both captain and stewardess flatly refused to undertake the responsibility of taking the child back to Guernsey, and the faces of two out of the three young men grew long at the prospect before them.

“We can’t take the brat back to London with us,” wailed Repton. “It’s you, Bayre, with your confounded philanderings about the island by yourself, who must have brought upon us the reputation of being philanthropists and foundling hospitals, and homes for lost or starving children! And so I vote it’s you who must leave it at the left luggage office at Weymouth. And if you won’t do that, why, Southerley and I must leave you there, that’s all.”

“First,” persisted Bayre, still haunted by his idea, “let us see if there isn’t a letter or direction of any kind packed in with the child.”

“Well, fire away,” said Repton, gloomily. “Here goes.”

And as he spoke he pulled the brown woollen shawl right off the basket with a violent wrench.

As he did so the wind and the violent action together caused a letter, which had been placed in the basket under the shawl, to flutter over the side of the vessel into the sea.

“There you are! What did I tell you?” cried Bayre, excitedly, making a wild grab in the direction of the missive that would have made all clear to them.

To the fresh consternation caused by this mishap there succeeded a wild desire to stop the boat and to secure the precious letter. But the captain would not listen to Repton’s loud expostulations on this subject, and the young man was driven half frantic between his own despair and the reproaches for his hasty action which his two companions did not hesitate to pour upon him.

In the meantime Southerley, partly out of bravado and partly out of real curiosity, had taken his turn at examining the child, and finally announced, with a great show of learning, that he knew from the shape of its headgear that it was a boy.

In his own mind, Bayre, who chose to keep his suspicions to himself, found this confirmation of his idea that the helpless creature who had been so unexpectedly entrusted to them was the heir to his uncle’s property. For he knew that his uncle’s child was a boy. At all hazards, then, the mite must be kept under his eye until he could find out what was the object of entrusting it to him and his companions in this mysterious manner. Once arrived in London he would write to Miss Eden and beg her to enlighten him upon the point.

If it was not the young girl herself who had contrived to send the infant in this manner to some place of greater safety than the cottage of the Vazons, she would at least be able to find out who had done so. As for the fact that she had given him no intimation of the strange commission, Bayre could not be surprised at it. For it was the sort of charge that a man might well have refused if he had known of it beforehand. So he reasoned with himself, and remembered at the same time that Miss Eden had spoken of some commission with which she thought of entrusting them.

In the meantime the child, having disposed of the opaque fluid in the bottle, struggled to sit up, and then to get on its feet and survey the new and rather astonishing world in which it found itself.

Surveying it with the calm scientific curiosity with which a young animal in the Zoo would have inspired him, Southerley drew the attention of his companions to this fact, and even made some solemn and ill-received attempts to conciliate the monster by duckings of the head and twiddlings of the fingers, at which the child stared with grave eyes.

“It’s not very intelligent,” said Southerley, becoming suddenly haughty when he perceived that his antics were creating more amusement among the grown-up persons on board than they did in the object of his playfulness.

“Come, give it a chance,” said Repton, whose first burst of indignation had already given place to something like active interest in the live animal which it seemed so impossible to get rid of. “Were you intelligent at eighteen months old?”

And recalling some of the ways by which comparative peace had been secured among the juvenile inhabitants of the nursery in which he had been one of a body of brothers and sisters, Repton began to show off his accomplishments in that direction by the production of his watch, with which he kept the enemy at bay for some minutes.

“He’s not a bad sort of youngster, as youngsters go,” he remarked apologetically, when both Bayre and Southerley began to smile at him in their turn. “But it’s jolly cold for him up here. I vote we take him down below and lend him to the stewardess while we decide what’s to be done with him.”

But when they had carried him downstairs, an operation during which they were objects of general interest, they found it such a fascinating occupation to chat with the stewardess and to play with the child at the same time, that the minutes flew quickly by, and they were half-way across to the mainland before they woke to the fact that they were as far as ever from a conclusion as to what was to be done with their new and unwelcome possession.

By this time they had grown less barbarous in their intentions, so that Bayre’s quiet announcement that he meant to take the child on to London, and to make inquiries from there as to its identity, met with but faint remonstrances.

“It’s rum sort of luggage to bring back with one from abroad,” protested Repton, with comparative meekness.

“An equivocal sort of possession, a baby!” suggested Southerley.

“It’s all right among three of us,” said Bayre, stoutly. “In numbers there is safety. Let us all show an equal amount of interest in him and we are safe from the breath of calumny. Nobody ever heard of a child with three fathers!”

“I don’t know how to show interest in a child of such tender years,” objected Southerley. “I’m ready to teach him Greek, but the question is whether he would be equally ready to learn.”

“There I have the advantage of you,” said Repton. “Painting, my profession, comes by nature. I’ve only got to put a brush in his hand and a canvas in front of him and he’ll go for it right away.”

“And the tragic part of the business is that his productions will be quite as much sought after as his master’s,” remarked Southerley.

“What is to be your share in his education, Bayre?” asked the artist, ignoring the feeble sneer.

“Manners, I think,” said Bayre, thoughtfully. “Manners and the use of the globes. Now any child who can whirl round a globe in its frame knows as much about the use of it as anybody.”

“And now supposing we have some luncheon and drink the young man’s health,” suggested the convivial Repton.

The suggestion being well received, they left the baby, who was getting sleepy and rather fractious, in charge of the stewardess, and adjourned to the saloon, where, their spirits rising under the influence of cold beef and bottled Bass, they drank the health of the youth of whom they had so strangely become the responsible guardians, and fell in with Bayre’s suggestion that they should throw themselves upon the mercy of Mrs Inkersole, their London landlady, and get her to recommend them to some woman whom they could trust to look after the child.

“And meanwhile you, Bayre, solemnly undertake to find out who the actual possessor is, and to dispose of the infant to the lawful owner.”

Bayre expressed his belief that he was equal to this task, and the matter was settled.

But the three temporary fathers soon found that a railway journey in charge of a lively young man of eighteen months is not an unmixed joy.

A sort of terror had seized upon the whole party long before London was reached; and when they found themselves in the cab, with the child now happily asleep in his basket cradle in one corner, a solemn silence, broken only by hushed whispers of dismal import, fell upon them all as they reflected upon the coming interview with Mrs Inkersole and the result it might have upon their long-standing tenancy.

“If she turns us out,” growled Repton under his breath, tremulously anxious not to wake the slumbering terror, “we shall have to wander about the streets singing for our bread with the child in a basket on a barrow in front of us. For certain am I that no self-respecting landlady would ever take in as fresh lodgers three young men and a miraculous baby!”

“It’s all your fault, Bayre,” said Southerley, sombrely. “I’m certain we could have found some better way out of the mess than this but for your infernal obstinacy.”

Bayre said nothing in particular. He was only too thankful to have got his own way, being, as he was, still in the belief that Miss Eden had wished him to take charge of the child, his uncle’s son as he believed him to be, and to deliver him into the hands of some safer guardian. Here was a fine excuse for communicating with her, and he meant to avail himself of it that very night.

When they reached the house in the street off Tottenham Court Road they found their difficulties begin at the very door. A determined attempt which Southerley and Repton were making to smuggle in the infant in its basket unremarked was foiled by a shrill squeal from under the brown woollen shawl as they reached the door-mat.

Susan, Mrs Inkersole’s most trusted lieutenant, uttered a gasp of amazement.

“Why, sir, what have you got there?” said she to Repton, who began to laugh idiotically, but without replying.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Southerley, testily, as he tried to rush the defences and to attain the staircase.

But Susan was firm.

“Is it a dog, sir?” she asked, seizing one end of the shawl and holding tight, while Repton looked at her fiercely, and Southerley showed an ominous disposition to drop his end of the basket and to run for it.

“Good gracious, no! What should we want a dog for?” said Repton, irritably.

“Because,” went on Susan, with firmness, “Mrs Inkersole can’t abide dogs—”

“But I tell you it isn’t a dog,” roared Repton, infuriated by the renewed squeals, unmistakable in their origin, which by this time came from the basket. While at the same moment a well-developed pink leg, which had kicked itself free of shoe and sock, was suddenly protruded from the wraps with which it had been covered, leaving no possible doubt as to the species of the animal underneath.

“Is that a dog, do you think?” asked Repton, with desperate calmness, pointing to the assertive limb.

Susan uttered a faint scream.

“Whatever do you gentlemen want with a baby?” she asked feebly.

“We don’t want anything with it,” replied the artist, fiercely. “We want to get rid of it, that’s what we want. And if you know any person idiotic enough to wish to possess a healthy human infant, of the male sex and with perfectly-developed lungs, why, give him or her our address, and tell him or her to apply early—”

“Hush!” broke in Susan in a frightened whisper.

And as she spoke she glanced towards the second door on the right, which was being softly opened and held ajar, as if some person behind it were listening to the conversation.

“What’s the matter?” asked Repton, leaving Southerley to take the basket and its living contents up the stairs, with the help of Bayre, who had now followed the others into the house after settling with the cabman.

“Oh, there’s a new lady in the dining-rooms—a student,” replied Susan in a low voice. “And perhaps she wouldn’t like it if she knew there’d be a child in the house crying half the day. But surely, sir, you don’t mean to keep it there, do you?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Repton, helplessly. “The little wretch was plumped down into the middle of our luggage when we came away this morning, and Mr Bayre thought it best to bring it on with us and to try to find out who it belongs to from here. But it’s a mad business. Here comes Mrs Inkersole. Oh, shut her up! Tell her anything, anything!”

And unable to stand a strict examination on the part of the landlady with neither of his friends to back him up, Repton flew up the stairs and straight into his room on the second floor.

But in the front room the unfortunate infant was making its presence known by a succession of screams so piercing that all three young men became possessed with a dreadful fear that it would shriek itself into a premature grave, and that they would conjointly be held responsible for its death in convulsions.

In vain they all three tried to soothe it. In vain Repton, seizing the milk-jug, which had been placed upon the table with the tea-things, tried to pour some of the milk into the child’s mouth, a proceeding in which he nearly succeeded in choking him. In vain Southerley dangled his watch before the boy’s eyes till he almost threw the works out of gear. In vain Bayre, the most anxious and miserable of the three, took the child in his arms and tossed it in the air with many frantic attempts to soothe and please it.

Still the unhappy and frightened babe screamed on, and was rapidly growing apopletic in his distress when they were all startled by a knock at the door.

“Oh, come in!” cried Bayre, foreseeing a terrible interview with the landlady which would bring their misfortunes to a climax.

But it was not Mrs Inkersole who entered. Looking shyly round her, bowing to the three young men with a downcast and blushing face, there entered, quietly dressed in black, a woman, a beautiful young woman, tall, broad-shouldered, with fluffy fair hair and the face of an overgrown baby, just the placid-looking, womanly, slow-moving creature whom Bayre had pictured as his ideal.

CHAPTER VIII.
BAYRE’S IDEAL

It is impossible to describe the scene of wild confusion which followed the lady’s entrance. Bayre nearly dropped the baby and Repton the milk-jug. While Southerley, the only member of the party who retained a little self-possession, tried in vain, by placing himself between Bayre and the fair visitor, to hide the cause of all their woes.

A preposterous attempt this at the best, since there was no mistaking the unfortunate child’s cries for anything else.

But their consternation was speedily changed to relief. For the lady, with scarcely more than a glance at any one of the young men, burst into the middle of the group, and stretching out her arms with the true woman’s instinct, took the child from Bayre’s well-meaning but clumsy grasp, and holding him against her shoulder while she gently rocked herself to and fro from one foot to the other, spoke to him in words wholly unintelligible to the male ear, as women do to babies.

For a few seconds the young men stood looking shyly at this goddess who had been so miraculously sent to their assistance, admiring beyond words the simple and instinctive art with which she accomplished in a few seconds what they had failed to do in all the hard work of a strenuous half-hour.

Fair-faced, blue-eyed, with one of those little Cupid’s bow mouths that never go with any great intellectual capacity, the newcomer looked just one of those placid, domestic goddesses in praise of whom Bayre was accustomed to speak so highly, and of whom Southerley, on the other hand, expressed so much scorn.

There was a timidity, a modesty in every movement, in every look, which proved how strong must have been the inducement which brought her thus into a room full of strangers. A sort of deprecatory expression in her blue eyes, and a blush which overspread her face from chin to brow, seemed to struggle with the overwhelming feminine instinct which had brought her to the rescue of the crying child.

When the sobs had subsided a little and it was possible to hope to be heard, Southerley dragged forward the best armchair, and said,—

“Won’t you sit down?” She shook her head, but he went on: “Do, please; you must let us have a moment to thank you for—for—for—”

“For saving us from the crime of murder,” cried Repton, tragically, as the lady, after another moment’s hesitation, sat down with the child in her lap.

“Oh, I’m sure you don’t mean that,” she said, in a low and gentle voice, as she looked down from him to the child. Then suddenly her tone changed, and she asked sharply, “When was he fed last? I believe he’s hungry.”

There was a rush of men to the table, and the next moment they all clamoured round her, offering such delicacies as a tin of sardines, a plate of winter apples, and some cheese.

The lady looked up and laughed mildly but scornfully.

“For a baby!” cried she. “Cheese! How absurd!”

“But he isn’t a proper, natural baby,” protested Repton, promptly. “Proper babies should drink milk, and when I offered him some he wouldn’t have it.”

“Let me try,” said the lady.

And hugging the child against her breast with one hand, she held a cup of milk-and-water coaxingly to his lips with the other, when behold! he drank eagerly and peacefully, to the admiration of everybody.

“He’s an artful little cuss,” said Repton. “He must have guessed there was an angel—I mean a lady—in the house as soon as he came inside the door, and made up his mind to get her attentions all to himself or perish in the attempt.”

The lady laughed again, but so low, so sweetly, that an answering smile appeared on the face of the child, whom she was now feeding with small morsels of bread-and-butter, with which she had silently beckoned Southerley to supply her.

“It’s his own fault if he’s hungry,” said Southerley, earnestly. “I myself bought him a Banbury cake and a cold sausage on the journey and he wouldn’t have either of them, except as weapons of offence.”

“It’s lucky he knew what was good for him better than you did!” said the lady.

“What would his mother say if she knew you’d tried to feed him with cold sausage?” cried Repton, regaining all his fancied superiority in the matter of infant management now that they no longer had the infant to manage.

The lady was still looking down upon the boy, who was as happy and good again as a child could be.

“Who is his mother?” she asked.

Dead silence.

The lady looked up and caught all the young men interrogating each other with their eyebrows.

“Don’t you know?” she asked with an air of natural surprise.

After another moment’s pause it was Bayre who boldly blurted out the truth.

“We haven’t the least idea.”

And he proceeded, in as few words as possible, to relate the whole story of their tragic experience of the day, to which the lady listened with wondering eyes.

“It’s all very strange,” said she. “But how very, very awkward for you!”

And then she burst out laughing, and the three young men, with a delightful feeling that this angel would help them out of their embarrassment, and that at any rate the baby had brought them a charming acquaintance, joined heartily in her merriment. Whereat the small boy made an ineffectual attempt to clap his pudgy hands in sympathy.

The movement caught the woman’s watchful eye, and she caught the child up to her neck and smothered him with kisses.

“Then—then,” stammered she when, blushing a rosy red, she looked up after this caress, “at present the child is in the singular position of having no mother, but three fathers?”

“That’s it exactly,” laughed Repton.

“And the worst of it is,” said Bayre, “that it’s one of those cases in which three men are not equal to one woman.”

The lady looked down at the child and hesitated.

“I suppose,” she said, “that it won’t be very long before you find out who the child belongs to?”

“Oh, no,” said Bayre, promptly. “We’re going to set about making inquiries at once. I’m writing to-night.”

“Who to?” cried Repton and Southerley in a breath, sinking grammar in their excitement.

But Bayre was dignified and reticent.

“Leave it to me,” said he. “It’s a matter where discretion is necessary.”

Southerley and Repton exchanged looks of suspicion and scorn. This fellow was trifling with the truth; for they were artful enough to know that the person to whom this discreet creature would apply was the last person who could help him in such a matter—the pretty girl from Creux.

“And in the meantime?” asked the lady.

“In the meantime,” said Southerley, promptly, “we could not think of allowing the child out of our care. You see we feel responsible for him. We don’t know who he is: the whole affair was very mysterious.”

Then there was a long pause. All the young men were hoping for the offer which presently came from the charming visitor.

“I’ve got rooms here myself on the ground floor,” she said. “After all, that’s not so very far away, is it? Supposing you were to let me look after the child for you until you have found out what you have to do with him? You can get an answer to your letter in three or four days, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes,” said Repton, eagerly.

“And you could trust me with him, couldn’t you? I haven’t had much experience with children,” she went on, “but I’ve had a baby cousin to look after, and—”

“We could trust you implicitly,” said Southerley, with unblushing magnanimity. “You have the real woman’s instinct with children, that’s certain.”

The lady rose at once, cuddling the baby, who was growing sleepy again.

“Then I think I’ll put him to bed at once,” she said, “for it’s plain that he’s tired out. Poor—ickle—manny. Poor ickle manny! Didn’t zey know what to do wiz a poor ickle mite-mite? Bye-bye. Cuddle down.”

And as she crooned these words low in the ears of the child she crossed the room towards the door, leaving the three young men in a state of subdued ecstasy. Then they all rushed to open the door for her.

But the stolid Southerley retained enough composure to say,—

“I beg your pardon, but—er—er—won’t you let us know your name? You see, as the responsible guardians of the child, we ought to be able to say in a moment, if we are asked, in whose care we’ve placed it.”

The lady stopped in the doorway, laughed in some confusion, and answered hurriedly,—

“Oh—oh, yes, of course. My name is Merriman—Miss Merriman. Good-night.”

The next moment she was gone.

The three men went back to the fireplace in complete silence. It was a fitting climax, this visit of the new beauty, to a wonderful day.

Repton broke the spell. Stretching his arms and drawing forth a deep sigh, he said,—

“Well, of all—!”

And then he paused.

Southerley pulled a chair up to the fire, arranged his feet over the fender to the exclusion of his companions, and became sentimental.

“Odd how pretty that baby talk sounds from a woman’s lips!” he said musingly. “I’ve always thought it so silly. But after hearing that handsome woman use it—by Jove!—I begin to see there’s some meaning in it after all!”

“She’s certainly handsome,” said Repton, “very handsome. And handsome inside and out, mind. The way she looked at that child showed the sort of woman she was—motherly, domestic, safe. By-the-bye, Bayre, there’s your ideal ready to hand, my boy!—gentle, placid, slow-moving, possibly not too quick-witted, and handsome besides. What could you wish for more?”

But before Bayre could reply, Southerley struck in, with some irritation,—

“What’s it got to do with him? He’s too much taken up with Miss Eden to have any thoughts to spare for anybody else. I suppose he doesn’t intend to monopolise all the women in the world!”

“I don’t know that I’ve monopolised so much as one yet,” said Bayre, meekly, from his corner.

He had thrown himself back in a chair away from the others, and was looking thoughtful.

“What’s the matter, Bayre?” asked Repton.

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Bless me! You don’t say so. What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going,” said Bayre, rising slowly from his chair with the same grave look on his face, “to put it into words, and to put those words into a letter. Good-night, you fellows!”

And with a nod he went out of the room.

But when it came to the point of taking pen in hand and beginning that momentous letter to Miss Eden, Bayre found his courage fail him. And instead of expressing the idea of which he had spoken, he contented himself with giving her the bare details of the adventure with the baby, the loss of the letter which had been on the child, and the appearance on the scene of the opportune Miss Merriman. Then he ran out, posted his letter, which he had written in studiously careful terms, that she might not think he was presuming upon their short acquaintance, and went back to his room in a state of considerable suspense.

The suspense continued for days, and went on for a whole fortnight, for Miss Eden vouchsafed no reply.

In the meantime, however, neither Miss Merriman nor the other two young men appeared to take greatly to heart the unexpected continuation of the period of their guardianship of the miraculous baby. Every day these three good fathers, mindful of their responsibilities, called dutifully at the ground-floor sitting-room, where they interviewed the object of their solicitude, and expressed their gratitude to Miss Merriman in trifling gifts of flowers and bonbons, which she was reluctant to accept, but which, as they pointed out to her, she was bound to allow them to bring, since she refused to let them pay for the large quantities of bread-and-butter and sponge-cake, milk and beef-tea, which their protégé consumed.

So that the period of suspense proved entirely supportable to two out of the three young guardians, and it was only Bayre who chafed under it.

He pointed out that they could not allow Miss Merriman to burden herself indefinitely with the care of another person’s child, and grew so fervid in his conscientious scruples on this head that nothing would satisfy him but to get leave of absence again (not without difficulty and even perjury in a mitigated form) and to return to Guernsey with the avowed intention of solving the mystery of the child’s parentage, and with an unavowed intention which both Repton and Southerley had no difficulty in divining.

The weather had changed for the worse since his first journey to the islands. It blew a gale as he crossed, and the snow and sleet drove in his face as he persisted in remaining on deck, watching for the first glimpse of the rocky coast.

But the atmosphere was not clear enough for him to discern anything until the vessel was close to harbour, and the thin white covering to road and roof, cliff and steeple, made everything ghostly and dismal in the light of a grey March day.

Bayre went straight to Madame Nicolas’ house, and, as he had taken the precaution to telegraph, he found an appetising breakfast waiting for him.

Keeping Madame in conversation, all with one object in view, he began by questioning her on indifferent subjects, and gradually worked round to the one thing of which his heart and mind were full.

Whether Madame had heard anything of the adventure with the baby he did not know, as she did not mention it, nor did he.

It was after a little pause for breath on her side that he presently asked, as if the matter were of no particular interest to him,—

“By-the-bye, have you seen anything of old M. Bayre and his young ward since we were here?”

Madame stood up and stared at him strangely.

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” she said in a low voice.

Bayre could scarcely keep his voice steady.

“Heard what?” said he.

“Why, the young lady was to be married to a gentleman of the island—this island—a Monsieur Blaise.”

“Yes, yes, so I heard. Well?”

“The wedding was arranged, so I understand; it was to be very quiet.”

“Yes.”

“Well, the young lady has disappeared.”

Bayre started up, his brain on fire.

“It’s not—it can’t be true!” he cried hoarsely.

CHAPTER IX.
A MYSTERY

Madame Nicolas looked at Bartlett Bayre with a shrewd suspicion in her eyes. It was evident that the young man took much more than the interest of a casual stranger in Miss Eden’s disappearance.

She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

“Ma foi, monsieur, I do not myself think it so surprising that a good-looking girl like Miss Eden should object to being married off to a man old enough to be her father, and by no means attractive at that. Not that I have a word to say against Monsieur Blaise, who is a most worthy gentleman, and well-to-do. But one must make allowance for the natural tastes of a young girl, especially of a girl whose father was an Englishman.”

Bayre heard very little of these words, and he presently broke in, with great suddenness,—

“When did she disappear?”

“I understand she has not been seen for three days.”

Bayre rose from the table with a strange look on his face and walked straight towards the door.

“Where are you going, monsieur?” asked his hostess, rather alarmed by the effect of her words.

She knew of the relationship between him and the recluse of Creux, and she felt uneasy lest the young man should take some aggressive action against the magnate, which might possibly get her into bad odour among her neighbours. For, like all the inhabitants of small islands, the natives were clannish, and strongly resented any interference from outsiders.

Bayre had his fingers upon the handle.

“I’m going to try to find out what has become of her,” said he, “and to see the Creux people about it.”

“Oh, nobody fears a tragedy,” she said quickly, though her tone was not particularly reassuring. “It is some girlish freak, no doubt. And in a few days she will return to her guardian’s house, satisfied with having given this little proof of spirit.”

But this suggestion did not satisfy Bayre, who knew more of the sensitive and emotional girl, after two or three short interviews, than the majority of the islanders would have found out in a couple of years’ acquaintance. Remembering as he did the change which came over her after her introduction to her proposed husband, he could not even feel that her disappearance was a matter of great surprise. That she could conceive the idea of running away, either back to the school she had left in France, or to friends in England, seemed to him a perfectly possible thing. Yet surely, if she had followed such a course, she would have been recognised on the journey! The boats were not crowded at that early season of the year, and she was of course well-known by sight to the people whom she must meet on such a journey.

Full of fears which he dared not define, Bayre left the house and made his way towards the harbour. As luck would have it, one of the very first persons who attracted his attention as he approached the quay was the peasant girl who had placed the baby in its basket among the luggage of the three friends. She was some distance away from him, sauntering towards him with a market basket on her arm, and chatting with another girl of about the same age and class. He saw her before she saw him; but as soon as he attracted her attention by quickening his pace to meet her, she stopped, turned pale, uttered a frightened exclamation, then turned and ran away at the top of her speed, her sabots clanking noisily on the ground as she went.

Of course he gave chase. But in a locality where she was at home and he was not, it was easy for her to escape him.

Baffled in his pursuit, and rendered more curious than ever by the guilty knowledge he had descried on her face, Bayre stopped in a chase which was exciting the amusement of casual passers-by, and retraced his steps towards the quay.

He decided that it would not be very difficult to trace this girl at a later time, since it was plain that she frequented the town, even if she did not live in it. In the meantime his first inquiries must be made in Creux.

He got nothing out of the boatmen who took him across to the little island; they had heard of the disappearance of the young lady, and one crudely and callously suggested that she might have drowned herself as the result of a love affair.

It was not gay at Creux! And for a young girl, too! Monsieur Bayre was an eccentric, a droll man! Strange things had happened on the island before. But there—let each man mind his own affairs and the world would go on very well.

Neither of the men would be more explicit than this: they had their living to get, and great part of it was got in the summer time by taking visitors to Guernsey across the water to Creux to see the famous museum, as they called the treasure-filled mansion of the old recluse.

Bayre began to understand how little sympathy he should meet with in the course of his investigations. Whatever freaks his uncle might be guilty of, he was held in reverence here as a Grand Seigneur, a man of wealth, and a source of legitimate income or of splendid charity.

When Bayre landed on his uncle’s little island, his overcoat buttoned up to the chin, his cap well drawn over his eyes, and his body bent to meet keen wind and driving snow, he knew that for all he might find out concerning Miss Eden’s disappearance and his uncle’s eccentricities he must depend upon himself alone.

Nevertheless, he took the strongly-built cottage of Pierre Vazon on his way, although the truth was the last thing he expected to hear from the lips of that unprepossessing person.

The home of the Vazons was a large stone-built cottage, built on a rather bleak spot, and sheltered only by a few now bare trees, and by its own outbuildings. There was nobody to be seen about outside, and it is impossible to exaggerate the desolation of the aspect of the whole island, seen thus through the driving snow, which had already covered the ground to the extent of an inch or so, making the sea around it appear of an inky darkness.

Bayre went boldly up to the cottage and looked in at the window as he passed. And he received a great shock on seeing that Marie Vazon, who was sitting by the window with her sewing, had a child, a well-dressed child, in a cradle at her feet.

Here then was a blow at one of his cherished beliefs. It was Marie Vazon who had charge of his uncle’s infant son, and the identity of the child who had been entrusted to the care of him and his friends was now as mysterious as ever.

As he stopped at the window, gazing in with an expression of bewilderment and dismay on his face, Marie Vazon noticed that a shadow was darkening the window, and glanced up.

He saw a swift look of amazement and alarm pass over the stolid peasant face, and then she looked quickly down again and went on with her sewing.

Bayre hesitated as to whether he should enter the cottage and make some inquiries there, or push on for his uncle’s house. While he debated with himself, he heard a rough voice behind him, and Pierre Vazon came up, greeting him in his French patois, in a manner half servile, half insolent.

“You are back again soon, monsieur,” said he, placing himself in front of the young man, and looking at him askance. “It is bad weather for travelling now.”

“Yes,” said Bayre.

“Monsieur must have strong reasons to bring him across in the snow and the bitter cold,” went on the man, with scarcely veiled curiosity.

“I hear you have had a strange event since my last visit,” said Bayre, without answering his implied question. “Is it true that Miss Eden is no longer here with her guardian?”

“Parbleu, monsieur, so it seems. We have seen nothing of her for two days. But your English young ladies—and Miss Eden was very English—they are so independent, we were not much surprised to find she had ended by thinking Creux too quiet for her.”

“You mean that no attempt has been made to find her, either by you or by her guardian, Mr Bayre?”

“Well, monsieur, I hunted all over the island for her, and my daughter too, as well as she could. But she has Monsieur Bayre’s child to look after,” went on the man, keeping his interlocutor fixed steadily with his small slits of eyes, “so that she has not much time for anything else.”

It occurred to Bayre as strange that the man should watch him in this peculiar fashion while he made this statement about the child, but he could think of no adequate reason for doubting the truth of his words. At the same time an impulse of curiosity made him ask abruptly,—

“Can I see the child?”

Pierre looked at him askance and shook his head.

He seemed to be searching for an excuse, Bayre thought. At last he found one.

“Since you have not been received by Monsieur Bayre, monsieur,” said Vazon, “I don’t know whether I ought to let you see his child.”

Bayre shrugged his shoulders.

“As you like,” said he.

And turning on his heel abruptly, he saw, as he passed the cottage window once more, that Marie Vazon was no longer sitting within. Looking round, he caught sight of Pierre disappearing hastily within the door of the cottage, and heard him turn the key in the lock. So, with one more look in at the window to ascertain whether the baby in the cradle was really alive, a fact which the infant obligingly proved by thrusting a crumpled fist outside its covering, he started in the direction of the mansion.

What was wrong? What was going on here, in this forgotten little spot of earth cut off by the sea from the rest of mankind?

That something was amiss Bayre was sure. Vague as his suspicions were, impossible as it was for him to make out what it was that he feared, there was such a strangely unsatisfactory atmosphere surrounding Pierre Vazon and his daughter, such a disquieting air of mingled servility and insolence in their address, such an expression of low cunning on both their faces, that the more he considered the matter the more uneasy Bayre became.

That they had had any hand in the disappearance of Miss Eden he did not believe. Why should they lay themselves open to ugly suspicions by interfering with a person who was not likely to stand in the way of their interests? If she had been the darling of her guardian’s heart, and they had suspected him of designing to benefit her in his will to the exclusion of their claims upon him, Bayre might have conceived it possible that the cunning peasants should have motives for getting her out of the way.

But everything went to show that, so far from being fond of his ward, the old man looked upon her simply as a burden and an unwelcome guest, to be got rid of by marriage as quickly as possible.

Far more likely was it that the high-spirited girl, after a scene of resistance to old Mr Bayre’s wishes in the matter of her marriage, had broken the ties between her and her guardian and left the island of her own accord.

But surmise was not enough: he felt that he must have fact to satisfy him. And the person to whom he would apply was his uncle himself. He would not be put off this time. And as he marched up the avenue under the snow-laden branches of the leafless trees, he resolved that he would take no denials, that he would gain admittance by hook or by crook to the presence of the mysterious recluse, and would try to probe to the reason of the strange dislike to meeting him which his uncle had shown.

He pulled the old-fashioned iron handle, and heard the bell clang through the house. Almost without a moment’s waiting he found the door opened; but a new thrill of suspicion and dismay struck a chill to his heart when he found that it was again Marie Vazon who had opened it to him.

His astonishment for the moment took away his powers of speech. She must have run up to the great house while he was in conversation with Pierre. And his hopes of getting admittance grew low as he met her cunning blue eyes and noted that she did not open the door very wide.

She waited for him to speak.

“I wish to see Monsieur Bayre, my uncle,” he said boldly at last.

Marie drew the door a little closer, shook her head, and smiled.

“Ah, monsieur, I regret that Monsieur Bayre cannot receive you—cannot receive anybody. He is ill—ill in bed,” said she.

“Will you take him my card? And I should like to scribble a few words on it first.”

He had taken out his pocket-book and found a card before he perceived that Marie Vazon had deftly and without noise put the chain on the door. Too indignant to say another word, he gave up the intention of writing anything on the card, and merely passing it to the girl through the narrow opening that was left, he went away.

What did this mean?

If he had not remembered that it was his uncle himself who had given the first intimation of his unwillingness to meet him, Bayre would now have suspected that the Vazons, for some reason of their own, wished to prevent the coming together of their master and himself. But with his two attempts to speak to his uncle, and his previous repulsion from the very house fresh in his mind, the young man could scarcely entertain this idea.

What then could be the motive for this marvellous eccentricity? He had never heard, from any of the inhabitants of the islands, a hint that his uncle was other than perfectly sane, or he might have ascribed this shyness to a caprice of insanity.

On the contrary, although all were agreed that his two recent misfortunes, the loss of his wife and the death of his cousin, had had a great effect upon him, yet everybody spoke highly of the old man as a good neighbour and a generous benefactor. How could his nephew’s visit in the company of his two friends be looked upon as an intrusion which justified such persistent and aggressive snubs?—snubs which seemed inconsistent with the known character of the man, and which nothing in his nephew’s personal history could be held to justify.

So mysterious, so incomprehensible did his uncle’s whole conduct seem, that Bayre conquered his first impulse, which was to turn his back upon the house with all possible speed, and resolved instead to play the spy a little, not more in the interests of his own natural curiosity than in his intense desire to learn what had become of Miss Eden.

When he had reached the avenue, therefore, he slackened his steps, and getting through the thin hedge on the left without difficulty, approached the house once more, this time by way of the other side, where a thick plantation had been partly cleared for a smooth lawn which, now an undulating sheet of snow, stretched away from the house to the sheltering wood behind.

A curious building it was, this low-roofed, rambling mansion, which had evidently grown to its present dimensions from a most modest country villa. The original building it was that Bayre came to first, a white-washed pile of simplest architecture, the ground-floor windows of which were closed up with heavy shutters. Most desolate did they look, these long windows down to the ground, with the closed shutters behind them. Beyond these he came to a stone extension, with a row of windows narrow and high, at least ten feet from the ground. He looked up at them with interest. There were no shutters to these, but he could see that there were iron bars on the inner side.

Bayre went further in his search and passed round a protruding wing, beyond which was a courtyard where the stones were moss-grown, little patches of green peeping up between the snow-drifts.

There was a sort of atmosphere about this corner which suggested the home of the sleeping beauty, for the trees had been allowed to grow as they liked, and their branches straggled across the pathway which led from this point through the wood. There was a stable, small for the size of the mansion, as was to be expected on the island: it appeared to be untenanted, and one of the windows was broken. The servants’ quarters, which were at this end of the house, had a desolate appearance. Bayre could hear certain sounds of work going on within; but it was rather the clanking of one pair of sabots on the flagged floor, and the clatter caused by one, or at most two, pair of hands, than the life and bustle of a large establishment.

He turned into the footpath, came upon a stiff-terraced garden with some mournful evergreens and still more mournful statues, and turned back towards the house.

It was that row of long, narrow windows high up in the wall that fascinated him and made him wonder what was behind: for this part of the house looked like a scrap of mediævalism wedged awkwardly between the products of other periods. Here, he thought, must be the treasures of which he had heard so much. As he stood looking upwards and wondering what was within, a strange sound reached his ears, as of the splintering of wood, the rattling of boards, and blows with a heavy instrument upon some hard substance. A movable pane in the window immediately over his head, opened for ventilation, enabled him to ascertain that these sounds came from the interior of the building.

The surface of the stone wall was rough: the young man’s curiosity was great. After a moment’s hesitation he threw his scruples to the winds, and with the assistance of an ill-kept growth of ivy which covered the lower part of the wall under some of the windows, managed to hoist himself to the level of one of them and to look in.

When his eyes, dazzled by the glare of the snow outside, had got used to the obscurity within, he found himself gazing upon a spectacle so strange, so grim, that he began to have a sort of feeling that the cold must have benumbed his senses and distorted his vision, so that real objects took the fantastic shape of things seen in dreams.

In the dimness of an open timber roof he saw winged things fluttering about, perching on the beams, uttering odd little twitterings and cooings in the darkness. On the wall opposite to him there were tapestries, some almost colourless with age, and some beautiful in tints which, in the dim light, all took a softening tone of tender mouse grey. There were glints of steel, too, against these hangings; here and there a ghostly figure in ancient armour, with lance in rest and helmet plumed, stood out from the dim background.

Clinging on with difficulty to the narrow slanting ledge, Bayre looked in with eager eyes, saw these things before him, and at one end, hazy in the distance, a gallery crossing the great hall from end to end, where old silver lamps hung by chains from above, and where the pipes of an organ and the graceful outline of a harp gleamed faintly out of the misty grey.

The other end of the hall he could not see. But he saw pictures hanging below the level of the windows, and on the floor beneath something that groped its way along slowly and painfully like an animal hunting for food.

Dog, or wild beast, or what? For a long time Bayre strained his eyes, unable to make out what that dark object was that groped and groped, at first quietly, and then with a sudden impulse of impatience, in the obscurity below him.

His heart seemed to leap up with an indescribable sensation which was partly horror and partly sheer amazement, when the creature suddenly reared up from the dark boards of the floor and showed the face of a man, withered, haggard, tense with an unearthly eagerness of longing.

“My uncle!”

The words were formed by the young man’s lips, but they did not reach the stage of uttered sound. He was, indeed, too sick with amazement at this uncanny sight to be able to speak at that moment.

Before he quite knew what the impression was which this sight had made upon him, the figure in the old dark coat was bending again upon the floor, and Bayre saw him raise a hatchet over his head and bring it down sharply upon the boards.

That fact was enough. Only one explanation, surely, could there be of the action of a man who would set to work to destroy his own dwelling in such a manner.

But before the young man had had time for another look, another thought, he suddenly found himself seized by the legs from below, and turning, saw that Pierre Vazon, with alarm and dismay on his face, and another and younger man, also in a blouse, had made him prisoner.

CHAPTER X.
OR A CRIME?

Bayre did not wait for a second summons to descend. He kicked himself free of the grasp of his captors and slid down to the ground beside them.

“Mon Dieu! monsieur, this is a strange way to visit a gentleman’s house!” cried Vazon, stammering with indignation and evident alarm. “I took you for a burglar, a thief. What do you want haunting a gentleman’s house when he will not allow you inside?”

“My uncle is mad,” replied Bayre, shortly.

“Mad? No. Not more mad than country gentlemen always are when they live by themselves and have nobody to contradict their whims,” retorted the plain-spoken peasant, scoffingly. “I call it more like madness for a gentleman to play the spy upon his relations and to hang about where he has been given to understand that he is not wanted.”

“I shall have an inquiry made into this,” said Bayre, shortly. “There are others concerned.”

And he walked away without further comment.

That he had alarmed Pierre Vazon by this threat of bringing outside inquiry into the matter was evident a few moments later when Pierre came running down the avenue after him, his manner changed from insolence to abject servility.

“One moment, monsieur,” he cried, gaining his point by his earnestness, and inducing the young man to stop and listen. “Pardon my rough manners if I said anything to displease you. I am but a peasant, with the manners of the soil. Remember, I love my master; I’ve served him many years now, and the thought that he should be interfered with, even in his caprices, seems like treason to me. Look here, monsieur. I know monsieur your uncle is eccentric; everyone knows it. But it is the eccentricity of a good man, a generous one, one with a good heart. If he amuses himself as others do not, where is the harm? Leave him in peace to enjoy the few years of life remaining to him, months only, it may be, for he is old and broken now.”

Doubtful though he was of Vazon’s entire good faith, the young man could not help being touched by his earnestness, and he promised not to do anything rashly or without due thought.

“But mind,” he went on, “I am not going to leave the island again without having seen my uncle and judged of his condition with my own eyes. So I warn you that, when I return, as I shall do in a few days, you had better rather help me than hinder me in my purpose of getting an interview with him.”

The old peasant gave a curious glance at the dark sea, which was already even rougher than it had been a couple of hours before, when Bayre came across from St Luke’s. And Bayre wondered whether the old man was speculating as to the chances of communication between the islands being cut off, as it was sometimes in the winter, by the spell of tempestuous weather.

“Certainly, certainly, monsieur, I will do my best, my very best. And when Pierre Vazon gives his word it is as the word of a gentleman.”

And with this parting speech, uttered with an air of uncouth dignity, raising his cap with great deference, Pierre Vazon disappeared in the direction of his own cottage.

Bayre hastened to the landing-place, where the boat was waiting to take him back. It was a very difficult matter to embark, and the two men in charge of the little craft whistled softly to themselves as they started on the return journey over the wild water, as sailors do under the excitement of a stormy day at sea.

The waves dashed into the open boat, which carried very little sail, for wind and sea ran high; and half a dozen times before the party reached St Luke’s they were threatened with the submerging of the boat.

A little knot of people assembled on the pier to watch the boat as, cleverly handled by the two men, it crested the waves and finally ran into shelter. And there, in the very front rank of the watchers, Bayre saw, to his surprise and delight, the peasant girl whom he wished to trace. He hid his face so that he might get out of the boat without her seeing him. But when he had landed, amidst the congratulations of the fishermen, who told him it was a risky thing to go out in such a sea, the young man was surprised to note that the girl did not attempt to run away on catching sight of him, but stared as if she had forgotten him altogether.

His first thought was that he must be mistaken and that this could not be the girl who had taken the baby on board. But a second inspection made him change his mind; and when she turned slowly away, talking to another girl, and making her way unconcernedly up the town, he followed at a safe distance, quite convinced that he was right after all, and that she was indeed the girl who had avoided him that morning.

She passed from the harbour to the marketplace, and thence up the one hundred and forty-five steps into the New Town, Bayre still following, and wondering whither this expedition would lead him. For he was not without suspicions that she might trick him after all, and that he might find himself at the end of his journey no wiser than at the beginning.

Right out of the town she went, and inland across country that looked bleak and uninteresting, with its scant supply of bare trees and its flat enclosures.

The snow no longer fell, but the wind was still high. And by the time the girl had reached the byway which led to a small stone farmhouse, the day had begun to draw in towards evening.

He lingered in the background till he saw her enter the little dwelling, and then, resolved to find out the truth about the child if possible, he went up the lane and knocked boldly at the door by which she had entered.

It was opened at once—by Miss Eden.

The cry of joy he uttered at the sight of her was so spontaneous, so heartfelt, that the young girl, who was smiling and holding out her hand, blushed and looked down as she met his glowing eyes.

“Come in,” she said.

And then, when he stepped into the beamed living-room, and saw the peasant girl grinning at him sympathetically from the background, he could not doubt that he had been made the victim of a most pleasant little plot between the two young women.

“This,” said Miss Eden, leading him across the stone-flagged floor, with its neat strips of home-made carpet, to a wooden armchair, where an old woman in an all-round white cap sat knitting by the fire, “is M. Bayre’s nephew, Madame Portelet.”

The old woman gave him a smileless but not uncordial welcome, speaking in the muffled tones of the deaf. And then Miss Eden turned to the young girl.

“It was Nini here who led you into this trap, by my command, Mr Bayre.” Nini dropped a curtsey. “When she saw you in the town this morning she came back and reported the fact. And then she went back and decoyed you here.”

Bayre was bewildered. Into all the delight he felt at finding Miss Eden safe and sound there would obtrude the pain of the mystery which surrounded not only her but his uncle and the unidentified baby. He began to feel, too, that he should never have the courage to ask all the questions he would have liked to have answered.

Miss Eden, indeed, led the talk as she liked. He fell instinctively into the position of her adoring humble servant, and accepted the tea she made for him, and the bread-and-butter which she cut with her own hands, without anticipating by so much as a word the moment when she would choose to enlighten him as to her strange position.

The time came at last. Nini had disappeared with the tea-tray into the back regions of the farmhouse, and Miss Eden led him to the window and sat down, while he stood leaning against the opposite end of the deep window-seat.

“You are surprised to see me here,” she said.

“I—I was only too delighted to s-s-see you anywhere,” stammered he. “When they told me you had disappeared, I—I—”

“Did you think I had drowned myself?” asked she with a pretty sauciness which enthralled him.

“I—I don’t know what I thought.”

“What has brought you back here?”

He looked at her, hesitated, and then stammered out,—

“Y-y-you, chiefly, I think.”

“Thank you. But—I don’t understand how I can have had anything to do with it.”

“Did you get my letter?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t answer it. Yet you half-promised—”

“To answer you if you wrote? I don’t remember doing that.”

“No. But you did promise to let me hear of or from you some day.”

“Ah! That’s vague, isn’t it?”

“In the meantime at least—thank Heaven!—you have thrown over old Blaise.”

“How do you know that?”

“Wasn’t it to escape him that you ran away?”

“Not altogether, I think. Though I admit that his likeness to everybody else of his generation was rather excessive.”

“Why have you run away then?”

In the dim light, which came partly from the waning daylight and partly from a dim little lamp, he saw that she grew very pale as she answered,—

“I—I had a fright.”

Remembering what he had seen that day, Bayre was on the alert in a moment.

“Ah!” said he. “Was it my uncle who frightened you? Tell me all about it. Indeed, I know something of the cause already, I think.”

She leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.

“Since you and your friends went away,” she began, “Mr Bayre has shown a strange restlessness and irritability; and instead of merely treating me with indifference, as he did before, he has seemed to take an absolute and strong dislike to me, so much so that he scarcely spoke to me without harshness, or a sort of querulousness still more difficult to endure. And in the meantime the two Vazons, who presume upon having the care of your uncle’s child”—Bayre listened intently to these words, but dared make no remark upon them—“kept more closely about him than ever, and evidently influenced the way he treated me. Naturally I resented this. And I resented, too, the way in which I was being thrown into the arms of this good Monsieur Blaise, who, I must tell you, is by no means so deeply enamoured of my charms as your uncle wished to make out, but who seemed rather to submit to the thought of marrying me than to show any enthusiasm over it.”

“What!” cried Bayre, indignantly. “I can’t believe it! Is he deaf and blind?”

Miss Eden laughed and blushed very prettily.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said she, “but at any rate you could see for yourself that he is past the age at which a man rushes headlong into matrimony. It seems he made careful inquiries into my ‘dot,’ and was disappointed to find I had only seventy pounds a year of my own.”

“The cad! The rascal!”

“Oh, not at all! Much more prudent than to dash into marriage, as some very silly young Englishmen might do—”

“Yes, yes, so they might—”

“Without making careful inquiries into their responsibilities. Well, he submitted with a good grace to my poverty-stricken condition, and things were in a very nice train, when—when—something happened, something that frightened me.”

“What was it?” asked Bayre, leaning down and guessing what sort of incident it was that had caused her alarm.

“It was something that made me think I ought to have time to find out a little more, and to consult somebody as to what I ought to do. Something which made me wonder whether I should do so wisely as I had supposed in following your uncle’s advice as to my marriage.”

“Yes, yes, go on. You saw something about him that made you suspect—what?”

“Why, that there’s someone living at the château besides himself.”

Bayre started back, staring at her in perplexity, as the memory of his discovery of that afternoon returned vividly to his mind.

“Someone besides himself! Who?” asked he, sharply.

“I don’t know. But it’s someone nobody knows anything about except himself and the two Vazons,” said Miss Eden. “And—and—I think it’s—a woman.”

Bayre stood up, struck with a horrible thought. Was his uncle keeping his own young wife shut up in his house with himself and the two Vazons for gaolers?

CHAPTER XI.
RIVALS

“Tell me all you know about this,” said Bayre, abruptly, when he had silently pondered for some moments on Miss Eden’s statement. “You may trust me. You wouldn’t have told me so much if you hadn’t felt sure of that.”

“That’s true. Well, what I know amounts to very little. But one day, as I was walking in the garden close to that end of the house that’s shut up—”

“Where the windows open down to the ground?” asked Bayre.

“The room next to that one it was, the very last room of all, where there are two windows barred on the outside and shuttered on the inside. You may not have noticed them, for there’s a creeper which has been neglected, a Virginia creeper, on that corner of the house; and the long dead branches hang like great bunches of string down over the windows.”

Bayre remembered the ragged Virginia creeper, though he had failed to notice the iron bars behind them, or the fact that these two windows were shuttered like those of the longer room beyond.

“Well?” said he.

“It was late one afternoon,” she went on, “that I saw the shutters of one of these windows put back and a hand thrust out to open the window. I was startled, and I must have made some sound, for I saw that the hand was a woman’s, and that the fingers were loaded with rings. It was drawn back instantly, and I heard a sort of tussle going on inside the room, and voices speaking low and hurriedly. And presently someone came to the window and looked out: but it was not the woman; it was your uncle. He looked down at me angrily, shut the window and closed the shutters.”

“You asked him about it, of course?”

“I shouldn’t have dared. But he told me, of his own accord, that he had caught one of the maids decking herself out in some jewellery which he kept in a locked-up room.”

“And may not that have been the truth?”

“I don’t think so. There are only three women about the house at any time: Marie Vazon, who is the only one who might dare such a thing, lives at her father’s, and is not very much at the big house at all. The other two are an old woman and her niece, neither of whom dares to stay a minute longer out of the servants’ quarters than she can help. And all three women have hands which are large and red, and the fingers of which could not wear rings of ordinary size. Well, such rings as I saw—valuable as they must have been if they were real—are not made in extraordinary sizes!”

“Do you think, then, that it’s his young wife he is keeping shut up there?”

By the look of consternation which passed over Miss Eden’s face, Bayre saw that this idea had not occurred to her.

“I never thought of that,” she said quickly. Then, as this suggestion seemed to fill her with horror, she cried quickly, “Let’s ask Nini about her. Oh, no, oh, no, I’m sure it can’t have been his wife.”

And Miss Eden rose from her seat, and hurrying across the room, opened a door at the back and brought in the peasant girl with a teacup in one hand and a cloth in the other.

“Nini lived at your uncle’s house all the time from before his marriage till a few weeks ago, when her grandmother had to send for her to come back here to her own home,” explained Miss Eden. “Ask her and she will tell you what she thought of young Mrs Bayre, and whether she was the kind of person who could be shut up against her will. You can ask her in English or French; she speaks both.”

Nini, who looked intelligent for her class, nodded assent to this speech, looking down modestly upon the floor. But Bayre had a sort of idea that, simple as she looked, he should get no one word more out of her than she chose to give. Obediently, however, he began to ask her questions.

“You were at Creux when young Madame Bayre ran away?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you see her run away?”

“No, sir. She took Marie Vazon with her. She had better have taken me. I shouldn’t have left her in the lurch and let her go off without her child as Marie did.”

“Ah! The child! Was that the child you brought on board in a basket and dumped down among the luggage of my friends and me?” asked Bayre, with what he considered to be startling suddenness.

But Nini was on her guard, of course.

“Plait-il?” she asked blandly, raising her eyes stolidly to his face.

“You won’t own to that, I see,” he said irritably. And turning shortly to Miss Eden, he observed, with some constraint,—

“This girl is the heroine of the incident I wrote to you about from London, Miss Eden. It was she who planted a young child among our luggage. I’m sure of it.”

There was a moment’s silence. Nini did not attempt any further contradiction. She looked stolidly down on the flagged floor again and waited for further questions. Miss Eden’s conduct was equally unsatisfying.

“There must be some mistake, I think,” she said. “But, in any case, that’s not the matter under discussion, is it?”

“If she won’t tell the truth in one matter it’s not likely she will in another,” said Bayre, drily.

“Let me try,” said Miss Eden, sweetly, and she addressed the girl at once. “What sort of life did they lead at the château when old Mr Bayre brought back his young wife, Nini?”

“It was not very comfortable, mademoiselle. Young Madame did not like Mees Ford, and Mees Ford did not like young Madame. Mees Ford was all for save, save: Madame liked ease, comfort, expense. Madame did not like to see her husband always consulting his cousin instead of her. Madame want her husband always to go away, especially when the baby came. It was not gay for Madame, who was young, to sit always in the great salon, the room where the shutters are now always closed, with that effigy, Mees Ford, opposite to her, knit, knit, knitting always as if for her life. One, two, three, four, always, count, count, counting. And poor young Madame sitting opposite, yawning over a book. Even her child was not allowed to be with her much. Old M. Bayre was proud of him, but he did not like the noise of a child’s crying. So it had to be kept in rooms that were a long way off, in the charge of its nurse and of Marie Vazon. And when the child was eight months old the nurse went away and he was left to Marie Vazon only. Madame did not like Marie, and that was another trouble. Mees Ford stood by the Vazons, father and daughter, while Madame hated them. Ma foi, I, for one, was not surprised when Madame ran away. The only wonder was she stood the life so long.”

“Did you ever hear any hint that she didn’t run away after all?” asked Miss Eden.

The girl looked up in real surprise.

“No, mademoiselle,” she answered with the accent of sincerity.

“Do you think it possible that she never went away at all, but that she was kept shut up at the château?”

The girl smiled incredulously.

“Oh, no; even if she was not very clever she would not have let herself be treated so. And besides, it must have been known.”

Miss Eden looked at Bayre.

“Was it jealousy of Miss Ford’s interference, then, that drove her away?” he asked.

“It was the miserable life they all led together,” replied the girl, promptly. “For Monsieur Bayre and his cousin quarrelled—they had always done so even before his marriage, and it was worse afterwards. He liked her, he respected her, but she was avaricious and mean, and so there was always a conflict between him and her as to the things he did. It was a wretched life for young Madame. She was too timid, too gentle to quarrel herself, but she had to listen to it all and to suffer for it.”

“And after she left, did you ever hear anything of her again?”

“Not a word. Monsieur Bayre and his cousin behaved as if she had never existed. At least, as far as we servants knew. They quarrelled more than ever, perhaps, and we saw less of him than we had done before. And when his cousin died in an apopletic fit—during a quarrel one night, I believe—he shut himself up altogether for a time. He was broken, aged; we were sorry for him.”

Miss Eden turned to Bayre again.

“That will do, Nini,” she said.

And the girl dropped them a rustic curtsey and returned to her work in the wash-house.

“She hasn’t told much that I didn’t know before,” said Bayre, drily.

He was offended by the bland impudence with which she denied her own action in regard to the child in the basket, and was inclined to resent the mystification in which he felt sure that Miss Eden had her share.

“Well, no doubt she’s told you all she could.”

“I don’t think so. However, we need not discuss that.” And he prepared to go. “At any rate, I’m thankful to have found you alive and well, Miss Eden.”

“Thank you. You are going?”

“Yes.”

“Shall I see you again?”

There was just enough of something that was not indifference in her voice, as she put the question, for Bayre to feel himself softening against his will.

“Oh, I—I don’t know,” he began. And then he said abruptly, “Do you wish to see me again—before I go?”

She lowered her eyelids demurely.

“Not if you think it too much trouble to come so far out of your way, Mr Bayre.”

“Oh, that’s just what I do feel, of course, that it’s too much trouble,” said he.

Miss Eden affected to misunderstand his tone.

“I thought so. Then good-bye, Mr Bayre.”

And she put out her hand with an off-hand coolness which, although he felt convinced that it was only assumed to annoy and pique him, made him furious.

“Oh, good-bye,” said he, with as little cordiality as was consistent with common decency, as he touched and dropped her offered hand and went to the door.

Miss Eden shut it after him, and he went back into St Luke’s, with just one glance behind which showed him only the closed door and no face at the window, in a state of rage and irritation of the keenest possible kind.

To think that he should have made such a fool of himself as to take this journey, at the risk of giving grievous offence by asking for a second holiday, just to see a disingenuous coquette who led him on only to deceive him. For that she knew all about the trick played upon him and his friends by Nini he felt convinced. Even her light way of passing over the subject was confirmation of that fact.

He wished he had not come. He was no nearer to the truth about the child than he had been before. While his interview with Miss Eden had only served to strengthen the impression she had previously made upon him, at the same time it for the first time raised in him doubts of her frankness.

Why did she make a mystery of the incident of the child? Did she think him incapable of keeping a secret? or did she think that he would resent being called upon to have any share in the safekeeping of the child who was his uncle’s heir?

In spite of the fact that he had seen another child at the Vazons’ cottage, Bayre still thought that the hero of the basket was his infant cousin. But in the face of Miss Eden’s rather haughty silence upon this point he dared not even ask the question. He was so angry and hurt, without quite knowing why, that he told himself he should take no more trouble over the matter, but should go back to London and wait for further developments, leaving Miss Eden to get out of her own difficulties as she might, and his uncle to be dealt with by Monsieur Blaise, who would no doubt in the end make some inquiries and discover the mystery, whatever it might be, that was connected with the château of Creux.

He felt some self-reproach down in the bottom of his heart at the idea of leaving it to a stranger to unearth a family secret. But, after all, he told himself, it was no affair of his, and the man whom old Mr Bayre had chosen for a sort of son-in-law had more reason for interference in the family affairs than a blood-relation who had been kept at arm’s-length.

In this mood he reached St Luke’s and passed an uneasy evening. But with a bright morning came softer thoughts and feelings, so that when he took his early walk, after his roll and coffee, he instinctively went up to the New Town and struck inland in the direction of Madame Portelet’s cottage.

By the luckiest accident in the world—in spite of his stoical resolve to have no more to do with her this was how he described it to himself—he met Miss Eden before he came in sight of the humble dwelling where she had found a temporary refuge.

She blushed very prettily at sight of him, and this fact gave him some secret satisfaction, to counterbalance the remembrance of her cool dismissal of the previous afternoon. But she took care to minimise the effect of this by raising her eyebrows and saying,—

“Then you haven’t gone back yet, Mr Bayre?”

“N-n-no,” said he. He turned and walked in silence for a few seconds beside her. “Are you sorry, Miss Eden, that I’ve not gone back?”

“I’m sorry you don’t seem to have enjoyed this visit as much as you did your last,” she replied discreetly.

“Well, you’re not as nice to me as you were last time, you know.”

“I?”

“Yes. You.”

He was regaining confidence a little. She was so much more coquettish than she had been on his first visit, that it suddenly dawned upon him that there might be a more flattering explanation of her conduct than the one of indifference.

“I’ve had a good deal to worry me since you were here before,” she explained more soberly, almost humbly. “Surely you know enough to understand that. Does a girl run away from her guardian’s house, as I did, without great provocation?”

“Of course not, of course not. Forgive me if, if I seem—seem—”

“I forgive you, certainly. And I can understand the trouble you are in yourself about all this. After all, Mr Bayre is your own uncle, and whatever concerns him, concerns the family, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. I’m glad you feel that. And you won’t think me intrusive if, feeling that, I feel also very much troubled about his treatment of you?”

“Oh, that’s nothing. I shall be all right.”

“Yes, but how? What are you going to do?”

“Well, I’ve written to someone, someone in England, to suggest that I should go there.”

“Let me see you safely to the other side, then—”

“Oh, no, thank you. I must have time to decide if that is best. I have written, and I am waiting for her answer.”

“This is some lady you know well that you think of going to?”

“No, I’ve never seen her,” began Miss Eden, rather reluctantly.

“And you mean to trust yourself to someone you don’t know?”

The tears sprang to the girl’s eyes.

“I have to,” said she, petulantly. “I have no near relations; you might have guessed that, since your uncle, who was only an old friend of my father’s, is my only guardian.”

Bayre’s heart began to beat very fast.

“No friends!” said he in a low voice, which was not very steady.

Miss Eden grew nervous and confused.

“Oh, no, of course I don’t mean that exactly,” she said with a little laugh. “Of course I’ve plenty of friends in one sense. But it is only very particular friends that one cares to live with—”

“But you said you didn’t even know her?” persisted Bayre, grown warm and earnest. “Why don’t you go to some of the friends you do know?”

“Well,” said she, desperately, “I want to be independent. If I were to stay with people older than myself I should have to fall in with their ways, to live their lives, and perhaps I shouldn’t like it.”

“But it would be safer for you, better for you,” urged Bayre, excitedly; “a girl who knows nothing of life, or men and women!”

“Oh, but don’t you think one’s instincts are guide enough? I do. It’s an exploded idea that girls can’t take care of themselves just as well as young men.”

“Oh, no, it’s not,” retorted Bayre, dictatorially. “Come, be advised by me. You can trust me to this extent, can’t you? Let me know where this lady lives and I’ll go to see her, take her a message from you, don’t you see? And I’ll find out all about her.”

“And supposing I were to say she lives in Lancashire, for instance?”

“I’d go just the same,” said Bayre, passionately. “Go straight there the moment I got to England.”

“Would you? Would you really do that? But I don’t see why you should. Why should you?”

There was just enough agitation in the girl’s voice, showing that she was touched, grateful, for the young man to be thrown at once off his balance.

“Because I love you,” was his straightforward answer, uttered in a low voice that thrilled her in spite of herself.

She did not shrink away, she did not answer; but she walked on beside him silently, biting her lip, and looking down. His head was still bent as he tried to look into her face, feeling that he had hazarded his all on one cast and that her next words must make or mar him for ever.

While they were both at white heat, as it were, he in the thraldom of his passion and she held by a pang of new and strange emotion, there fell upon them, like water upon a conflagration, the sound of a thick, husky man’s voice—the voice of a man to whom exercise was a burden and a fatigue.

“Hein!” said the voice.

And at the sound the two young people shivered guiltily and stopped, turning, as they did so, to face the direction whence the sound came.

And on the other side of a low stone wall, where a clump of evergreens had hidden him from sight as they passed, they saw the portly form, the round, red face, and the Panama hat of Monsieur Blaise.

But he was not wearing his blue goggles. He had taken these off and held them in one hand, in order that he might have a clearer and better view of the guilty couple.

CHAPTER XII.
THE MEETING

Miss Eden recovered her self-possession sufficiently to hold out her hand. The angry M. Blaise took no notice of it.

“Won’t you shake hands with me? What have I done?” said she.

“What have you done?” retorted the stout gentleman, frowning upon her and her companion with strict impartiality. “That, mademoiselle, is what everybody has asked for two days. It is a strange thing for a young lady to disappear from among her friends.”

“I wasn’t very far off,” said she, humbly. “I was staying at the cottage of the grandmother of one of my guardian’s old servants.”

Monsieur Blaise made a slight motion with his head, which may have meant approval or disapproval, assent or dissent.

“And why, mademoiselle, did you indulge this caprice?”

Miss Eden hesitated.

“May I help to explain?” said Bayre, diffidently.

“And who are you, monsieur?” said the elder man, with some asperity.

“I am one of the nearest living relations of Mr Bartlett Bayre, whose namesake I am,” said the young man, readily.

This information evidently surprised Monsieur Blaise, and somewhat mollified him.

“Then you are a relation of this lady’s also?”

“No,” said Bayre. “But as she is my uncle’s ward, I naturally feel a great interest in her welfare.”

When he came to this point in his speech, Bayre saw that Monsieur Blaise began to look at him askance, so he paused.

“Ah! Ah! No doubt!” said Monsieur Blaise, drily. “And she feels an interest in you, and confides to you only the secret of her hiding-place.”

Both the young people protested in a breath, so volubly, and with so much detail, that they managed to convince the elderly gentleman that Bayre’s discovery of the lady had been an accidental one.

“And why did you go away?” Miss Eden hesitated. “Why, if you wanted to go away, did you not at least let me know where you were?”

“The fact is, Monsieur Blaise,” broke in Bayre, “that my uncle’s conduct has been very eccentric lately, and that Miss Eden got frightened. But she doesn’t like to admit the fact.”

The manner of Monsieur Blaise changed and grew expansive in a moment.

“Ah, ah!” cried he, opening his small blue eyes very wide, so that they looked like two glass marbles in an undulating field of pink. “Now I begin to perceive! Eccentric! Mon Dieu, I am with you there. Our friend is eccentric beyond all experience!” He turned quickly to the girl. “Did he alarm you then, mademoiselle, by his eccentricity? What is it that he has done?”

Again she hesitated, and again Bayre spoke for her.

“My uncle showed no violence to her,” he said, “and I think it a pity she ever came away.”

Monsieur Blaise assented vehemently, with so many noddings of his head, that he looked like one of those toy figures whose loose heads swing in an open neck.

“Pity! Yes, yes, it is a pity,” he assented. “If you were afraid, Miss Eden, you should have consulted me. A word to your future husband—”

Miss Eden laughed a little and interrupted him.

“Oh, surely, Monsieur Blaise, you can’t want to marry me still? I am too erratic for you, you know.”

“Erratic, yes, so you are,” agreed the stout gentleman with deliberation. “But, enfin, it must be that one’s wife have some defects! And if one knows them beforehand, one is prepared.”

Miss Eden grew pale with consternation.

“But,” she began in a faint voice.

Before she could get any further, Monsieur interrupted her briskly, and indicating Bayre with a wave of the hand, said, with elaborate courtesy,—

“Ah! Is it that you wish to marry this gentleman?—this nephew of your guardian?”

The blood rushed into her pale face as she drew herself up.

“Oh, dear, no. I never thought of such a thing!” she cried emphatically.

Bayre drew himself up too, and Monsieur Blaise smiled so expansively that the flesh of his large round face rolled up into a succession of shiny pink ridges.

“It is well, it is well,” he said, “but we should be grateful for his excellent suggestion. I agree with him that you should go back to your guardian’s house, and this gentleman and I will discuss the matter of his kinsman’s eccentricity, which is undoubted. In the meantime you need have no cause for alarm while you have two friends near at hand. You are staying in Guernsey, monsieur?”

“For a few days only. I propose to go over to Creux, and to put up at the house of the boatman who lives by the landing-place. He lets lodgings, I know.”

“A good idea!” assented Monsieur Blaise. “In the meantime I should like to have a few further words with you upon this matter, when we have seen this young lady safe on her return journey.”

Miss Eden was taken aback by this sudden settling of her destinies, but she submitted, and returned at once to Madame Portelet’s cottage, to prepare her hostess for her departure. Monsieur Blaise took Bayre confidentially by the arm, and walked with him some distance, talking eagerly, and panting as he talked.

“My dear young friend,” he said earnestly, “I am glad you came here. I have had certain doubts, certain very odd suspicions, I may now confess, about our friend at Creux. With a member of his family who shares my opinion that something is wrong there, I am bold, I am fearless. We will go together, you and I, to the château, we will meet your uncle face to face, side by side.” And he waved his arm in the manner of one who storms a fortress sword in hand. “And we will solve our doubts without delay.”

Bayre caught at this suggestion, which was as opportune for him as for the other. With Monsieur Blaise he would no doubt be admitted to his uncle’s presence, and perhaps he would learn more in a single interview than he would have been able to do in six months of inquiry.

“You have definite suspicions?” asked he.

Monsieur Blaise gave one of his large nods.

“Do you think he is mad?”

“I will say nothing,” said the stout gentleman, “until I am more sure of what I think. In the meantime let us make an appointment. Shall we meet at the harbour this afternoon and cross together in time to reach the château about four?”

“Just as you please.”

“It is agreed then,” said Monsieur Blaise, who for the most part spoke excellent English, dropping into the French idiom only when he was strongly excited. “Be at the harbour at half-past two and we will settle this matter without delay.”

The appointment made, perhaps Monsieur Blaise forgot all about Miss Eden, for he at once took leave of the younger man and returned to his own house.

Bayre lingered in the neighbourhood, hoping for another tête-à-tête with Miss Eden.

He had not to wait long. She came back from the cottage at a brisk pace, with Nini to carry her travelling-bag. She blushed and would have passed him with a smile and a few words of casual greeting, but he would not allow that.

THEMIS-RULE OF THREE

CONTENTS