t, Miss Challoner? Yes, this is a quiet corner, and the children
will not disturb us. Look at that urchin, with his bare brown legs and
curly head: is he not a study? Ah, if he had lived--my----" And then
he sighed, and threw himself on the beach.

"Well," observed Phillis, interrogatively. She was inclined to be
short with him this morning. She had kept her word, and put herself
into this annoying position; but there must be no hesitation, no
beating about the bush, no loss of precious time. The story she had
now to hear must be told, and with out delay.

Mr. Dancy raised his eyes as he heard the tone, and then he took off
his spectacles as though he felt them an incumbrance. Phillis had a
very good view of a pair of handsome eyes, with a lurking gleam of
humor in them, which speedily died away into sadness.

"You are in a hurry; but I was thinking how I could best begin without
startling you. But I may as well get it out without any prelude. Miss
Challoner, to Mrs. Williams I am only Mr. Dancy; but my real name is
Herbert Dancy Cheyne."

CHAPTER XXXIV.

MISS MEWLSTONE HAS AN INTERRUPTION.

"HERBERT DANCY CHEYNE!"

As he pronounced the name slowly and with marked emphasis, a low cry
of uncontrollable astonishment broke from Phillis: it was so
unexpected. She began to shiver a little from the sudden shock.

"There! I have startled you,--and no wonder; and yet how could I help
it? Yes," he repeated, calmly, "I am that unfortunate Herbert Cheyne
whom his own wife believes to be dead."

"Whom every one believes to be dead," corrected Phillis, in a panting
breath.

"Is it any wonder?" he returned, vehemently; and his eyes darkened,
and his whole features worked, as though with the recollection of some
unbearable pain. "Have I not been snatched from the very jaws of
death? Has not mine been a living death, a hideous grave, for these
four years?" And then, hurriedly and almost disconnectedly, as though
the mere recalling the past was torture to him, he poured into the
girl's shrinking ears fragments of a story so stern in its reality, so
terrible in its details, that, regardless of the children that played
on the margin of the water, Phillis hid her face in her hands and wept
for sheer pity.

Wounded, bereft of all his friends, and left apparently dying in the
hands of a hostile tribe, Herbert Cheyne had owed his life to the
mercy of a woman, a poor, degraded ill-used creature, half-witted and
ugly, but