s voice calling from the
upper gate.

"Y'r honour!" Abe snatched his hoe and wheeled about sharply as the
great man came down the path with Mr. Pope at his heels.

"How long have you been working here?" demanded Sir Caesar. "Perhaps I
had better have said 'idling,'" he added, with a frown and a curt nod
at Tregarthen in the gateway. Sir Caesar's gray eyebrows had a trick of
bristling up, like a cat's, at the first hint of unpleasantness, even
at sight of anyone who crossed his will; and they bristled now.

"'Been workin' here the best part of the morning," answered Abe, with
an old man's freedom of tone and a complacent look backward at the
patch of turned soil. "And 'might have been workin' yet but the
children singin' their hymn yonder"--with a jerk of his thumb towards
the wall that hid the school building--"warned me 'twas time to knock
off for dinner."

Now, the Lord Proprietor had meant his question for preface to another.
"Had Abe, while at work, caught sight of a strange lady anywhere in the
garden?" The question, if put just then, and in Tregarthen's hearing,
might have changed the whole current of this small history; for
Tregarthen was a poor hand at dissimulation--or, rather, was incapable
of it. But the sight of his back, as he turned away, caused Sir Caesar's
eyebrows to bristle up yet more pugnaciously.

"Hi, sir?"

Tregarthen turned slowly.

"You are waiting here to fetch your children from school, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Tregarthen.

"And isn't that an instance, man, of what I tried to make you
understand two days ago? Cannot you see what time and trouble you'll be
saving yourself--let alone the children--when you're comfortably
settled on Brefar and within half-a-mile of a handy school?"

"Yes," said Tregarthen again. His eyes met the Lord Proprietor's
without servility as without disrespect, but with a kind of patient
wonder.

"Well, then"--Sir Caesar turned to Mr. Pope for confirmation--"here is a
man who--to give him his due, eh?--works as hard as any on the Islands;
harder, I daresay, than his own hired labourer----"

Mr. Pope nodded.

"--A man," continued Sir Caesar, "who never gives himself a holiday; a
man whose nature it is to grudge every hour of the day that isn't
employed in wringing money out of a desert. Come now!"--warmed by his
own eloquence to a geniality equally hearty and false, Sir Caesar swung
around again upon Mr. Pope--"I daresay we may call him, to his face,
abo