sophisticated at present,
and the property of that _demi-mondaine_! He wondered if there could be
any relationship between them. There was something in the child's eyes
that in some strange fashion recalled the eyes of Rosa Mundi. So might
she once have gazed in innocence upon a world unknown.

Again, almost savagely, he strove to thrust away the thoughts that
troubled him. The child was bound to be contaminated sooner or later;
but what was that to him? It was out of his power to deliver her. He was
no rescuer of damsels in distress.

So he put away from him the thought of Rosa Mundi and the thought of the
child called Rosemary who had come to him out of the morning sunlight,
and went back to his hotel doggedly determined that neither the one nor
the other should disturb his peace of mind. He would take refuge in his
work, and forget them.

But late that night he awoke from troubled sleep to hear Ellis Grant
laugh again in careless triumph--the laugh of the man who knows that he
has drawn a prize.

* * * * *

It was not a restful night for Randal Courteney, and in the early
morning he was out again, striding over the sunlit sands towards his own
particular bathing-cove beyond the breakwater.

The tide was coming in, and the dashing water filled all the world with
its music. A brisk wind was blowing, and the waves were high.

It was the sort of sea that Courteney revelled in, and he trusted that,
at that early hour, he would be free from all intrusion. So accustomed
to privacy was he that he had come to regard the place almost as his
own.

But as he topped the breakwater he came upon a sight that made him draw
back in disgust. A white mackintosh lay under a handful of stones upon
the shingly beach. He surveyed it suspiciously, with the air of a man
who fears that he is about to walk into a trap.

Then, his eyes travelling seaward, he spied a red cap bobbing up and
down in the spray of the dancing waves.

The impulse to turn and retrace his steps came to him, but some unknown
force restrained him. He remembered suddenly the current that had more
than once drawn him out of his course when bathing in those waters, and
the owner of the red cap was alone. He stood, uncertain, on the top of
the breakwater, and watched.

Two minutes later the very event he had pictured was taking place under
his eyes, and he was racing over the soft sand below the shingle at the
top of his speed. Tw