e without a reference to "Your husband,
madame!"

This Patsy thought a great liberty. What could he know about the matter?
He had not seen Saunders Duff's registers, and of a certainty Godfrey
McCulloch had not spoken. Still, she finished by liking to hear him say
the words, and often left the real Stair idly tossing stones into the
water, in order to go into the cool kitchen of Tower Rathan, to sit on
one of the ancient oaken chests, a row of which ran round the walls, and
hear tales of the dare-devil Stair, and especially to listen for the
respectful repetition of her favourite phrase, "Your husband, madame!"

She loved to hear how her husband (she could say the word to herself now
sometimes) had accepted the outcast and had treated him like a man when
he was trodden under foot. She could not listen often enough to the
history of the restitution of the money and jewels with which Eben had
ridden away from the White Loch. Stair had insisted on that, though he
had no reason to love the Duke of Lyonesse.

Then she would go back and lo! there--prone on the sand, his rough
muzzle on Stair's knees, his big brown eyes under shaggy bristles of
eyebrow, gazing up into his master's face, lay Whitefoot. Only, such was
the fineness of his breeding and the delicacy of his sheep-dog instinct,
that he rose instantly when he heard Patsy's returning footsteps, and
took himself out of the way. He worshipped none the less, only at a
greater distance. Patsy's was now the first right.

"Why do they love you so much, Stair?" said Patsy abruptly, as she sat
down beside him after one of these kitchen visits.

"They--who?" said Stair, sleepily. For warm pebbles, warm sands, the lee
of a rock and the gentle lap of a sheltered sea make for drowsiness.

"Well," said Patsy, "Eben and Whitefoot there--they don't care a straw
about me."

"Whitefoot would defend you with his life," put in Stair, sitting up.

"Yes, because you tell him," said Patsy, pulling discontentedly at a
blade of grass, "and as for Eben--he simply cannot keep from singing
your praises!"

Stair laughed, gaily for him. He did not often laugh aloud.

"Patsy," he answered, "how many have loved you--Princes and Princesses,
men and women in another world than mine? Now, none of these love
me--and strange as it may seem, I am not disquieted about the matter."

"I daresay not," snapped Patsy, who this morning for some reason was
easily irritated, "but they are not here. Ebe