outs with this and asks me to give it to them
for their trouble."

Mrs. Treacher held out a golden sovereign. The Commandant stared at it.

"You kept it back?" he gasped.

"I had to, sir. A couple of ignorant seamen--that didn't want it,
either!"

"Give it to me!"

"There's one blessing--you can't possibly overtake 'em," said Mrs.
Treacher, as the Commandant snatched the coin.

He gazed down the hill, and decided that to this extent she was right.
With one hand gripping the sovereign, and the other lifted to his
distraught brow, the Commandant strode to the room where Vashti sat at
breakfast. She looked up and welcomed him with a gay smile.

CHAPTER XI

PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

Vashti sat on the low stone wall beyond the Keg of Butter Battery and
gazed out over the twinkling Sound and the Islands. The wall ran along
the edge of the cliff and moreover was ruinous, as the Commandant had
cautioned her when she chose her perch.

For a while she did not appear to have heard him, but sat with lips
half-parted as though they drank in their native air, and with eyes
half-closed--but whether in mere delight or because through the present
they were looking into the past, the Commandant could not determine.
She had invited him after breakfast to conduct her round the old
fortifications, and he had done so in some dread of her questions and
comments. But she had asked scarcely a question and made no comment at
all. She was thinking less of the change in his batteries and defences
than of the change in him, as with a deeper knowledge of women he might
have divined. In the inanimate work of man's hands woman takes no real
interest, whatever she may feign, but of man himself she is insatiably
curious and critical. So while the Commandant, moving with her from one
battery to another, had halted and stared down on the grass-grown
platforms, ashamed and half-afraid lest by lifting his eyes he should
challenge her pity, he missed to perceive and missed altogether to
guess that hers were occupied in taking note of him, of his thread-bare
coat, of the stoop of his shoulders, of the whitened hair brushed back
from his temples.

They had made the round of the batteries in almost complete silence;
and coming to the wall above the Keg of Butter she had perched herself
there and bent her eyes seaward.

She may or may not have been aware that this gave him opportunity to
take stock of her in his turn, and that he was using it ver