yes, has overstepped discretion."

"Has my father bidden you to tell me this?"

"Since when have I enjoyed your father's confidence to that degree? No,
no, Cynthia. I plead the boy's cause to you because--I know not because
of what."

"It is ill to plead without knowing why. Let us forget the valiant
Kenneth. They tell me, Sir Crispin"--and she turned her glorious eyes
upon him in a manner that must have witched a statue into answering
her--"that in the Royal army you were known as the Tavern Knight."

"They tell you truly. What of that?"

"Well, what of it? Do you blush at the very thought?"

"I blush?" He blinked, and his eyes were full of humour as they met her
grave--almost sorrowing glance. Then a full-hearted peal of laughter
broke from him, and scared a flight of gulls from the rocks of
Sheringham Hithe below.

"Oh, Cynthia! You'll kill me!" he gasped. "Picture to yourself this
Crispin Galliard blushing and giggling like a schoolgirl beset by her
first lover. Picture it, I say! As well and as easily might you picture
old Lucifer warbling a litany for the edification of a Nonconformist
parson."

Her eyes were severe in their reproach.

"It is always so with you. You laugh and jest and make a mock of
everything. Such I doubt not has been your way from the commencement,
and 'tis thus that you are come to this condition."

Again he laughed, but this time it was in bitterness.

"Nay, sweet mistress, you are wrong--you are very wrong; it was not
always thus. Time was--" He paused. "Bah! 'Tis the coward cries "time
was"! Leave me the past, Cynthia. It is dead, and of the dead we should
speak no ill," he jested.

"What is there in your past?" she insisted, despite his words. "What
is there in it so to have warped a character that I am assured was
once--is, indeed, still--of lofty and noble purpose? What is it has
brought you to the level you occupy--you who were born to lead; you
who--"

"Have done, child. Have done," he begged.

"Nay, tell me. Let us sit here." And taking hold of his sleeve, she sat
herself upon a mound, and made room for him beside her on the grass.
With a half-laugh and a sigh he obeyed her, and there, on the cliff, in
the glow of the September sun, he took his seat at her side.

A silence prevailed about them, emphasized rather than broken by the
droning chant of a fisherman mending his nets on the beach below, the
intermittent plash of the waves on the shingle, and the scream of t