stonishment may be pictured when she discovered that
her friend of the island was in very truth her own grandfather, and her
happiness when she and her mother removed the next week from Marine
Terrace to the Chase can scarcely be described.

"It's just like a fairy tale!" she declared. "I never thought when I sat
on the top of the Scar that afternoon, looking down at the lovely house
and garden, and saying what I would do if I lived there, that it could
ever really come to pass. It's almost too good to be true, and I
shouldn't be in the least surprised if it were only a dream after all."

It soon proved to be no dream, but a most satisfactory reality, when she
saw herself installed as her grandfather's favourite companion in the
very surroundings which she had so much admired. To Colonel Stewart she
filled the vacant place of the little daughter he had lost in former
years; and so keen was his pleasure in his newly-found grandchild, that
if Isobel had not been of a thoroughly sensible nature I fear she would
have run a very great risk of becoming completely spoilt. Her mother's
influence and her own naturally unselfish disposition saved her from
that, however, and the wholesome discipline of school life afterwards
taught her to be able to take her grandfather's kindness without
acquiring an undue idea of her own importance. She was very happy at the
Chase, and especially delighted when Colonel Stewart made her a formal
present of the desert island.

"It shall be yours, to do what you like with," he declared. "I promised
to lease it to you when you found the runic cross, and I think you
deserve to have it for your own. It shall be one of my presents to you
on your eleventh birthday."

That happy event was to take place in the course of a few days, and to
celebrate the occasion all the Sea Urchins had been invited to a garden
_fete_ at the Chase, as a winding up of the club before the various
children left Silversands; for it was September now--governesses were
returning, schools were reopening, and the holidays were over at last.

It was a lovely autumn morning when Isobel, with a bright birthday face,
looked out of the open window of her pretty bedroom, to see her island
shining in the early sunshine against the sea, and the shadows falling
over the lawns and gardens of the beautiful spot which was now her home.

"I'm the luckiest girl in the world!" she thought, as she ran down to
the breakfast table, to find her