the domestic routine that Mrs. Penaluna would never have supported.

Later in the day the sunrays caught the grey castles that face one another at the "Narrows" of the Dart, where of old the ancient seaport repelled invaders by a chain across the river. A misty amethystine shimmer brooded over the hills, and the red-brown of the bracken on the cliffs gleamed with the sparkling points of light as Captain Penrice's sailingyacht, her sails "barked" red-brown like a trawler's, stole between the ancient seaward-looking towers.

"Ay," said Captain Penrice, "this old river's seen a deal of life. Crusaders, sea-robbers, Norsemen, merchant princes, they all knew the 'Narrows.""

"To the conquest of the world," said Wilmot, with a thrill in her voice, "our forefathers sailed through here-Raleigh, Davis, Gilbert, to the Pacific Seas and the Arctic wastes. There oughtn't to be any dead here," she said, pointing to the churchyard that hangs on the hillside against the church; "it's the quick, not the dead, we think of here. All the splendour and the pride of things, these are the memories at the 'Narrows,' where real live men went to their great deeds."

There was something cruel in the inflection of her full voice. The pagan scorn of the other side of things hurt both her listeners. Miss Penaluna thought pitifully of her own life of arrowroot, milk puddings and patience.

"It's quick, bright things that come soonest to destruction, you know, child," said the captain.

"Then don't let us think of that, never talk of it, or look at it. Look," she said, pointing to the winding paths on the opposite bank, "there under the pines there grow white lilacs, gorse, and tropic plants side by side, and the cuckoo sings in spring over the humming of the bees in the lilac bushes. That for the years that are, and the kingly names for the years that are gone."

Robbers, those kingly men, robbers, child," said Captain Penrice.

"But robbers who robbed for a nation and fed off gold plate, Uncle Dickie."

"And none the better for that," growled he. Just then they were nearing a ketch-rigged boat with white sails. "A Frenchie," he said, "come over with mullet to exchange with our men for ray. There's not so much of that as there used to be, though 'tis but ten hours, with a fair wind, to Cherbourg. The steam-capstans seem to have taken all the grit out of our folks."

The steam-capstan, which had at that time been recently introduced on the trawling-boats, reduces the work of drawing up the trawl to about twenty minutes instead of over an hour.

"Why, over to Challacombe, I've seen Roscoff pebbles as plentiful as you may further west; but the lads liked a bit of a spree in the good old times. They're half-baked, slack toads now."

"Roscoff pebbles" are stones which have a round hole through them: through this the strap passed that joined two kegs together, the stone being used to prevent friction in passing smuggled liquor up cliff-side, and on mules' backs on the journey inland.

Wilmot and Miss Penaluna laughed, for they followed the captain's thought: for all his scorn of Elizabethan robbers, he liked a "bit of a spree," and deeply regretted the passing of the smuggling days, when a journey to Roscoff on the French coast was always to be had for a lad who wanted adventure.

When the captain, helping William with the sails, was out of earshot, Miss Penaluna protested in her mild way to Wilmot.

"You frighten me," she said, "for you want to have everything without pain and shadow. Perhaps we talked all wrong this morning. I'm not sure that we didn't."

"I hate everything maimed. I had a dog once that broke its leg, but I wouldn't keep it. I had it sent away, after it had been set, to some one who didn't mind. That's why sometimes I can't bear Tony's work. Always touching sick things."

"But to heal?"

"They ought to be put out of sight. I love perfect things. Do you know, I like to be lightly dressed, to feel the sun strike through to my body, to feel it sun-warmed, and know how sweet it is."

Miss Penaluna shivered, but Wilmot was scarcely conscious of speaking to any one but herself.

"And my child must be perfect," she said, "with round limbs that I can pass my hands over like a sculptor over his statue. Must, must, must," she said low to herself, as if in appeal to the hidden forces that make the earth children.

Miss Penaluna put a fluttering hand into the captain's as he helped her up the landing steps. He read her look rightly enough, though he had not heard Wilmot's whispered words.

"A mighty queer maid, that of ours," he said, "but a little soul that God didn't leave out of count when he made her, for all the queerness. We've to stand by her, all of us, Miss Dorothy."

Miss Penaluna forgot her sense of decorum altogether in the sweetness of finding herself coupled with the old man in so human a task.

"So we will, Captain Dickie," she said.

"Then let's shake hands on it, Miss Dorothy," he said, suiting the action to the word, while Wilmot watched them from her cushions with rallying eyes, too far off to hear their low words, and putting her own mischievous interpretations on their doings. "You don't mind my calling you Miss Dorothy," he said, "for I'd a sister called Dorothy, and it comes slick to the tongue somehow."

Lying alone, save for William, among the boat cushions Wilmot watched the light fade over Regiswear, once the city of bygone merchant princes and of adventurers, more kingly still. Scornfully she compared with it the sordid struggle of Challacombe; in that place of a stone there were no "quick, bright things," only the age-long gaining of a little food for generations of greedy mouths that ate— and died. And her life too, as was Tony's, would soon be merged in drab acquiescence.

At the thought her nerves thrilled, as they do in a moment of dangerous choice. For her child should be quick with the wrestling spirit of a noble nature, if she could give it him. The vital energy that is the driving force of character should raise him, at least, above his mother's folly, his father's poverty of spirit. She would be strong-willed for him, strong in the midst of pettiness. Born in struggle, he should throw the world, for would he not be like Michael Angelo, born among the stone quarries; like Napoleon, . conceived in the trenches. The small disciple of Lamarck felt the world-force hers, for the moment. Against a background of grey sky, in the roar of the north wind, she would bear a master spirit.

But Miss Penaluna felt herself a woman of the world when she had returned from her yachting expedition; wherefore she sternly ordered her maid Susan to remove from her sitting-room the garments that had been put to air on chair-backs; for in that household of women, nightdresses sometimes invaded the sitting-rooms; but now it even seemed possible that Captain Penrice might come to see her. She flushed pink at the temerity of her thought, however; for in Challacombe many strict ladies avoided even express trains as indelicate, since so many men travel by them.

CHAPTER XII

THE COURT OF THE GENTILES

"It's come, miss, it's come," panted Susan, bursting suddenly into Miss Penaluna's drawing-room, where she was sitting with Wilmot, a few days later. "Oh, I'm sure I beg pardon. I didn't know you'd company," she finished. "I'm not company," said Wilmot; "and I want to know what's come quite as much as Miss Penaluna does."

The post arrived late in the mornings in Challacombe in days before the advent of the railway. Miss Dorothy's maid, Susan, had a stolid face, all broken up to-day like the water of a placid estuary before the rush of the incoming tide.

"He've written," said she, her big-boned stays creaking audibly with the stress of the heart beneath, "and I never thought to see it. No, never, though I've been down on my knees for it night after night."

Susan's romance had come to her in the Regiswear Cottage Hospital, which she had visited the year before with an attack of pneumonia. There was a simple-hearted eagerness to be helpful in her, which led the nurses to allow her, when she became convalescent, to fetch and carry in the wards. In the men's ward there lay her fate. He saw, he promised, he conquered, and left, promising to make a home for Susan. For some months nothing had been heard of him, and the girl had been growing dingier and dingier as the hopes went.

"I'm very glad," said Miss Penaluna, "for you. But what does he say ?"