nquiries anywhere
except Tolling, and that feather-head Alfred, who you can't trust half a
minute out of your sight." Here she paused in her narrative and made a
move, adroitly driving Theresa Bilson before her out on to the landing,
thus putting a greater distance between that tormented spinster and the
neighbourhood of Damaris' bed-chamber. Her handsome brown eyes held the
light of battle and her colour was high. She straightened a chair,
standing against the wall at the stair-head, with a neatly professional
hand in passing.

"Mrs. Cooper and I were fairly wild waiting down on the sea-wall with the
lantern, thinking of drowning and--worse,--when"--she glanced sharply at
her companion and, lowering her eyes altered the position of the chair by
a couple of inches--"when Captain Faircloth's boat came up beside the
breakwater and he carried Miss Damaris ashore and across the garden."

"Stop"--Theresa broke in--"I do not follow you. Faircloth, Captain
Faircloth? You are not, I earnestly hope, speaking of the owner of that
low public-house on the island?"

"Yes--him," Mary returned grimly, her eyes still lowered.

"And do you mean me to understand that this young man carried Miss
Damaris--actually carried her"--Miss Bilson choked and cleared her throat
with a foolish little crowing sound--"carried her all the way into the
house--in his arms?"

"Yes, in his arms, Miss. How else would you have had him carry her?--And,
as gentle and careful as any woman could, too--into the house and right
upstairs here"--pointing along the passage as if veritably beholding the
scene once more--"and into her own bedroom."

"How shocking. How extremely improper!"

Theresa beat her fat little hands hysterically together. She credited
herself with emotions of the most praiseworthy and purest; ignorant that
the picture conjured up before her provoked obscure physical jealousies,
obscure stirrings of latent unsatisfied passion. More than ever, surely,
did the needle quiver back to that fixed point of most righteous anger.

"Such--such a proceeding cannot have been necessary. It ought not to have
been permitted. Why did not Miss Damaris walk?"

"Because she was in a dead faint, and we'd all the trouble in life to
bring her round."

"Indeed," she said, and that rather nastily. "I am sorry, but I cannot
but believe Miss Damaris might have made an effort to walk--with your
assistance and that of Cooper, had you offered it. As I remarked at