Manasseh dropped in the coins one by one, and tied the neck of the bag

with its silken ribbon.  The Collector took it from him and tossed it to
the girl.

"Here--catch!" said he carelessly.

But her burnt hands shrank from closing on if, and it fell to the floor.
She stooped, recovered it, and slipped it within her bodice.  As she
rose erect again her eyes rested in wonder on the black servant who with
a crumb-brush was sweeping the rest of the money off the table and
catching it upon the coffee-salver.  The rain and clash of the coins
appeared to confuse her for a moment.  Then with another curtsy and a
"Thank your Honour," she moved to the door.

"But wait," said the Collector sharply, on a sudden thought.  "You are
not meaning to walk all the way home, surely?"

"Yes."

"At this hour?"

"The wind has gone down.  I do not mind the dark, and the distance is
nothing. . . . Oh, I forgot: your Honour thinks that, with all this
money, some one will try to rob me?"

The Collector smiled.  "You would appear to be a very innocent young
woman," he said.  "I was not, as a fact, thinking of the money."

"Nobody will guess that I am carrying so much," she said simply; "so it
will be quite safe."

"Nevertheless this may help to give you confidence," said he.
Feeling in the breast pocket of his laced satin waistcoat, he drew forth
a diminutive pistol--a delicate toy, with a pattern of silver foliated
over the butt.  "It is loaded," he explained, "and primed; though it
cannot go off unless you pull back the trigger.  At close quarters it
can be pretty deadly.  Do you understand firearms?"

"Grandfather has a fowling-piece," she answered; "and, now that his
sight has failed, on Sundays I try to shoot sea-birds for him.  He says
that I have a good eye.  But last week the birds had all flown inland,
because of the gale."

"Then take this.  It is nothing to carry, and you may feel the safer for
it."

She put up a hand to decline.  "Why should I need it?"

"We'll hope you will not.  But do as I bid you, girl.  I shall be
passing back along the beach in two days' time, and will call for it."

She resisted no longer.

"I will take it," she said.  "By that time I may have thought of words
to thank your Honour."

She curtsied again.

"Manasseh!" Captain Vyell pointed to the door.  The negro opened it and
stood aside majestically as she passed out and was gone.


Let moralists perpend.  Ruth Josselin had knocked at that door after a
sharp struggle between conscience and crying want.  The poverty known to
Ruth was of the extreme kind that gnaws the entrails with hunger.
It had furthermore starved her childhood of religion, and her sole code
of honour came to her by instinct.  Yet she had knocked at the door with
no thought but that the Collector's guinea had come to her hand by
mistake, and no expectancy but that the Collector would thank her and
take it back.  She was shy, moreover.  It had cost courage.

"Honesty is the best policy."  True enough, no doubt.  Yet, when all is
said, but for some radical instinct of honesty, untaught, brave to
conquer a more than selfish need, Ruth had never brought back her
guinea.  And, yet again, from that action all the rest of this story
flows.  When we have told it, let the moralists decide.



Chapter VI.


PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.


Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon pedigree: and
here, as well in compliment to him as to make our story clearer, we will
interrupt it with a brief account of his family and descent.

The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house of
Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood,
may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept.
It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with no
less than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought on
the winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West,
had held estates there and been people of importance ever since.

The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of
the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands.  Yet they kept
themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their
heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by
developing certain tin mines on his estate and working them by new
processes, set up the family fortunes once more.

His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them.  A contemporary narrative
describes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very good
estate.  His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver)
first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made him
Commissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the Post
Office. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity and honesty,
hath continued him in the office of Postmaster.  He is a gentleman of a
sweet, easy, affable disposition--a handsome man, of middle stature,
towards forty years old."  This was written in 1713.  Sir Thomas died in
1726, of the smallpox, having issue (by his one wife, who survived him
but a few years) seven sons and three daughters.

1.  Thomas, the third Baronet: of whom anon.

2.  William, who became a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a
page to Queen Mary, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.  A memoir
of the time preserves him for us as "a tall sanguineman, with a
merry eye and talkative in his cups."  He married a Walpole, but his
children died young.

3.  John, who, going on a diplomatic mission to Hamburg, took a fever
and died there, unmarried.

4.  Henry, the father of our Collector.  He married Jane, second
daughter of the Marquis of Lomond; increased his wealth in Bengal as
governor of the East India Company's Factory, and while yet
increasing it, died at Calcutta in 1728.  His children were two
sons, Oliver and Henry, with both of whom our story deals.

5.  Algernon, who went to Jesus College, Cambridge, became a Fellow
there, practised severe parsimony, and dying unmarried in 1742, had
his eyes closed by his college gyp and weighted with two penny
pieces--the only coins found in his breeches pocket.  He left his
very considerable savings to young Oliver, whom he had never
seen.

6.  Frederick Penwarne, barrister-at-law.  We shall have something to do
with him.

7.  Roger, who traded at Calcutta and making an expedition to the
Persian Gulf, was killed there in a chance affray with some Arabs.

8.  Anne, who married Sackville.

9.  Frances Elizabeth, who married Pelham.

10. Arabella, whose affections went astray upon a young Cornish yeoman.
Her family interfering, the match was broken off and she died
unmarried.


Oliver and Henry, born at Calcutta, were for their health's sake sent
home together--he one aged four, the other three--to be nurtured at
Carwithiel.  Here under the care of their grandparents, Sir Thomas and
Lady Vyell (the Protector's grand-daughter), they received instruction
at the hands--often very literally at the hands--of the Rev. Isaac
Toplady, Curate in Charge of Carwithiel, a dry scholar, a wet
fly-fisher, and something of a toad-eater.  They had for sole playmate
and companion their Cousin Diana, or Di, the seven-year-old daughter of
their eldest uncle, Thomas, heir to the estates and the baronetcy.

This Thomas--a dry, peevish man, averse from country pursuits, penurious
and incurably suspicious of all his fellow-men--now occupied after a
fashion and with fair diligence that place in public affairs from which
his father had, on approach of age, withdrawn.  He sat in Parliament for
the family borough of St. Michael, and by family influence had risen to
be a Lord of the Admiralty.  He had married Lady Caroline Pett, a
daughter of the first Earl of Portlemouth, and the pair kept house in
Arlington Street, where during the session they entertained with a
frugality against which Lady Caroline fought in vain.  They were known
(and she was aware of it) as "Pett and Petty," and her life was
embittered by the discovery, made too late, that her husband was in
every sense a mean man, who would never rise and never understand why
not, while he nursed an irrational grudge against her for having
presented him with a daughter and then ceased from child-bearing.

Unless she repented and procured him a male heir, the baronetcy would
come to him only to pass at his death to young Oliver; and the couple,
who spent all the Parliamentary recesses at Carwithiel because Mr.
Thomas found it cheap, bore no goodwill to that young gentleman.
He _en revanche_ supplied them with abundant food for censure, being
wilful from the first, and given in those early years to consorting with
stable-boys and picking up their manners and modes of speech.  The uncle
and aunt alleged--and indeed it was obvious--that the unruly boys passed
on the infection to Miss Diana.  Miss Diana never accompanied her
parents to London, but had grown up from the first at Carwithiel--again
because Mr. Thomas found it cheap.

In this atmosphere of stable slang, surrounded by a sort of protective
outer aura in their grandparents' godliness, the three children grew up:
mischievous indeed and without rein, but by no means vicious.
Their first separation came in 1726 when Master Oliver, now rising ten,
left for London, to be entered at Westminster School.  Harry was to
follow him; and did, in a twelve-month's time; but just before this
happened, in Oliver's summer holidays.  Sir Thomas took the smallpox and
died and went to his tomb in the Carwithiel transept.  Harry took it
too; but pulled through, not much disfigured.  Oliver and Diana escaped.

The boys, to whom their grandfather--so far as they regarded him at
all--had mainly presented himself as a benevolent old proser, were
surprised to find that they sincerely regretted him; and the events of
the next few weeks threw up his merits (now that the time was past for
rewarding them) into a sharp light which memory overarched with a halo.
Tenderly into that halo dissolved his trivial faults--his trick, for
example, of snoring between the courses at dinner, or of awaking and
pulling his fingers till they cracked with a distressing sound.
These and other small frailties were forgotten as the new Sir Thomas and
his spouse took possession and proceeded in a few weeks to turn the
place inside out, dismissing five of the stable-boys, cutting down the
garden staff by one-third, and carrying havoc into the housekeeper's
apartments, the dairy, the still-room.

In these dismissals I have no doubt that Sir Thomas and Lady Caroline
hit (as justice is done in this world) upon the chief blackguards.
But the two boys, asking one another why So-and-so had been marked down
while This-other had been spared, and observing that the So-and-so's
included an overbalancing number of their own cronies, found malice in
the discrimination, and a malice directed with intent upon themselves.

Young Oliver, as soon as Harry was convalescent, discussed this
vehemently with him.  Harry, weak with illness, took it passively.
He was destined for the Navy.  To him already the sea meant everything:
as a child of three, on his voyage home in the _Mogul_ East Indiaman, he
had caught the infection of it; on it, as offering the only career fit
for a grown man, his young thoughts brooded, and these annoyances were
to him but as chimney-pots and pantiles falling about the heads of folks
ashore.  But he agreed that Di's conduct needed explaining.  She had
taken a demure turn, and was not remonstrating with her parents as she
ought--not playing fair, in short.  "It must be pretty difficult for
her," said Harry.  "I don't see," said Oliver.


The two boys went back to Westminster together.  They spent the
Christmas holidays with their Uncle Frederick, the barrister, who
practised very little at the law either in court or in chambers, hut
dwelt somewhat luxuriously in the Inner Temple and lived the life of a
man-about-town.  Their summer vacation was to be spent at Carwithiel;
but, as it happened, they were not to see Carwithiel again, for before
summer came news of their father's death at Calcutta.  He had amassed a
fortune which, translated out of rupees, amounted to 400,000 pounds.
To his widow, in addition to her jointure, he left a life interest of a
thousand pounds _per annum_; a sum of 20,000 pounds was set aside for
Harry, to accumulate until his twenty-first birthday; while the
magnificent residue in like manner accumulated for young Oliver, the
heir.

Lady Jane returned to England, to live in decent affluence at Bath; and
at Bath, of course, Oliver and Harry spent their subsequent holidays,
while their Uncle Frederick continued by occasional dinners and gifts of
pocket money, by outings down the river to Greenwich, by seats at the
theatre or at state shows and pageants, to mitigate the rigours of
school.  Had it occurred to Oliver Vyell in later life to set down his
"Reflections" in the style of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, he might
have begun them in some such words as these: "From my mother, Lady Jane
Vyell, I learned to be proud of good birth, to esteem myself a
gentleman, and to regulate my actions by a code proper to my station in
life.  This code she reconciled with the Gospels, and indeed, she rested
it on the rock of Holy Scripture.  From my Uncle Frederick I learned
that self-interest was the key of life; that the teachings of the
priest-hood were more or less conscious humbug; that all men could be
bought; that their god was vanity, and the Great Revolution the noblest
event in English history. . . ."

The sane infusion of Father Neptune in Master Harry's blood preserved
him from these doctrines, and before long indeed removed him out of the
way of hearing them.  Soon after his fifteenth birthday he sailed to
learn his profession shipping (by a fiction of the service), as
"cabin boy" under his mother's brother.  Lord Robert Soules, then
commanding the _Merope_ frigate.

Oliver proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and thence (without waiting
for a degree) to make the Grand Tour; in the course of which and in
company with his cousin, Dick Pelham, and a Mr. Batty Langton, a Christ
Church friend, he visited Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, and
Constantinople, returning through Rome again and by way of Venice,
Switzerland, Paris.  He reached home to find that his mother, who
believed in keeping young men employed, had procured him a cornetcy in
Lord Lomond's Troop of Horse.  He was now in possession of an ample
fortune.  He would certainly succeed to the baronetcy, and to the Vyell
acres, which were mostly entailed.

But the grave itself could not give lessons in greed to a true Whig
family of that period.  Lady Jane had it in her blood, every tradition
of it.  Her son (though within a few months he rose to command of a
troop) detested all military routine save active service.  He despised
the triumphs of the Senate.  To keep him out of mischief--or, rather, as
you shall hear, to extricate him from it--the good dame made application
to the Duke of Newcastle; and so in the year 1737, at the age of
twenty-one, Captain Oliver Vyell was appointed to the lucrative post of
Collector to the port of Boston.

He had held it, now, for close upon seven years.



Chapter VII.


A SABBATH-BREAKER.


Now, in his twenty-eighth year, Oliver Vyell, handsome of face, standing
six feet two inches in his stockings, well built and of iron
constitution, might fairly be called a sensual man, but not fairly a
sensualist.  The distinction lay in his manliness.  He was a man, every
inch of him.

He enjoyed hard riding even more than hard gaming, and far more than
hard drinking; courted fatigue as a form of bodily indulgence; would
tramp from twenty to thirty miles in any weather on a chance of sport;
loved the bite of the wind, the shock of cold water; and was a bold
swimmer in a generation that shunned the exercise.

He awoke next morning to find the sun shining in on his window after a
boisterous night.  He looked at his watch and rang a small bell that
stood on the table by his bed.  Within ten seconds Manasseh appeared,
and was commanded first to draw up the blind and then, though the hour
was early, to bring shaving-water with all speed.

While the negro went on his errand Captain Vyell arose, slipped on his
dressing-gown, and strolled to the window.  It looked upon the ocean,
over a clean stretch of beach that ran north-west, starting from the
pier-head of the harbour and fringing the town's outskirt.  Half a dozen
houses formed this outskirt or suburb--decent weather-boarded houses
standing in their own gardens along a curved cliff overlooking the
beach.  The beach was of hardest sand, and just beneath the Collector's
window so level that it served for a second bowling-green, or
ten-pin-alley.  Thus it ran out for some twenty rods and then shelved
abruptly.  Captain Vyell, who had an eye for such phenomena, judged that
this bank had formed itself quite recently, since the building of the
pier.

A heavy sea was running, and evidently with a strong undertow.  When
Manasseh returned with the hot water, Captain Vyell announced that he
would bathe before taking his chocolate.

"Yo' Hon'ah will bathe befor' shaving?"

"You d----d fool, did you ever know me do _any_thing before shaving?"

Manasseh chose a razor, stropped it, and worked the shaving soap into a
lather.

"Beggin' yo' Hon'ah's pardon," said he, "it bein' de Lawd's Day, an'
these Port Nassau people dam' ig'orant--"

"Hand me the _peignoir_," commanded his master sharply.

He sat, and was shaved.  Then, having sponged his chin, he ordered
Manasseh to lay out his bathing-dress, retire, find a back way to the
beach and, having opened all doors, attend him below.  He indued himself
in his bathing-dress very deliberately, standing up for a minute stark
naked in the sunshine flooding through the open window--a splendid
figure, foretasting battle with the surf.

Then, having drawn on his bathing-dress and thrust his feet into
sand-shoes, he cast his dressing-gown again over him and went down the
stairs at a run.  The doors stood open, and on the beach the negro
awaited him in the right attitude of "attention."  To him he tossed his
wrap and shoes, and ran down to the beach as might swift-footed Achilles
have run to be clasped by the Sea-Goddess his mother.

Through the shallow wavelets he ran, stepping high and delicately
splashing merry drops against the morning sunlight, leaped over one or
two that would have "tilled" him to the knee (to use an old boyish
phrase learnt at Carwithiel where he had learnt to swim), and came to
the shelf beyond which the first tall comber boomed towards him, more
than head high, hissing along its ridge.  There, as it overarched him,
he launched his body forward and shot through the transparent green,
emerging beyond the white smother with a thrill and a laugh of sheer
physical delight.  Thrice he repeated this,--

"Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave,
Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in. . ."

passed the fourth wave, gained deep water, and thrust out to sea with a
steady breast-stroke, his eyes all the while on the great embracing
flood which, stretch as it might from here to Europe, for the moment he
commanded.

Manasseh watched him from the beach.  From the cliff above two
scandalised householders calling to one another across their gardens'
boundary pointed seaward and summoned their families to the windows to
note the reprobate swimmer and a Sabbath profaned.

The eyes of a long-shore population are ever on the sea from which comes
their livelihood, and nothing on the sea escapes them long.
The Collector's head by this time was but a speck bobbing on the waves,
but ere he turned back for shore maybe two hundred of Port Nassau's
population were watching, from various points.  The Port Nassauers,
whatever their individual frailties, were sternly religious--nine-tenths
of them from conviction or habit, the rest in self-defence--and
Sabbatarians to a man.  The sight of that heathen slave, Manasseh,
waiting on the beach with a bath-gown over his arm, incensed them to
fury.  Growls were uttered, here and there, that if the authorities knew
their business this law-breaker--for Sabbath-breaking was an indictable
offence--should be seized on landing, haled naked to justice, and
clapped in the town stocks; but fortunately this indignation had no
concert and found, for the moment, no leader.

The Collector, having swum out more than half a mile, turned and sped
back, using a sharp side-stroke now with a curving arm that cleft the
ridges like the fin of a fish.  His feet touched earth, and he ran up
through the pursuing breakers--a fleet-footed Achilles again, glittering
from the bath.  Manasseh hurried down to throw his mantle over the
godlike man.

"Towel me here," was the panting command.  And, lo! slipping off his
bathing-dress and standing naked to the sea.  Captain Vyell was towelled
under the eyes of Port Nassau, and flesh-brushed until he glowed (it may
be) as healthily as did the cheeks of those who spied on him.  On this
question the Muse declines to take sides.  For certain his naked body,
after these ministrations, glowed delicious within the bath-gown as he
mounted again to his Olympian chamber.  There he allowed Manasseh to
wash out his locks in fresh water (the Collector had a fine head of
hair, of a waved brown, and detested a wig), to anoint them, and tie
them behind with a fresh black ribbon.  This done, he took his clothes
one by one as Manasseh handed them, and arrayed himself, humming the
while an air from Opera, and thus unconsciously committing a second
offence against the Sabbath.

He descended to find Dicky already seated at table, awaiting him.
Dicky had slept like a top in spite of the strange bed; and awaking soon
after daybreak, had lain cosily listening to the boom of the sea.
To him this holiday was a glorious interlude in the regime of Miss
Quiney.  His handsome father did not kiss him, but merely patted him on
the shoulder as he passed to his chair; and to Dick (though he would
have liked a kiss) it seemed just the right manly thing to do.

They talked merrily while Manasseh brought in the breakfast dishes--for
Master Dicky bread-and-milk followed by a simple steak of cod; a
bewildering succession of chowder, omelet, devilled kidneys, cold ham,
game pie, and fruit for the Collector, who professed himself keen-set as
a hunter, and washed down the viands with a tankard of cider.
He described his bathe, and promised Dicky that he should have his first
swimming lessons next summer.  "I must talk about you to your Uncle
Harry.  Craze for the sea?  At your age if he saw a puddle of water he
must stick his toes in it.  He's cruising just now, off South Carolina,
keeping a look-out for guarda-costas.  He'll render an account of them,
you may be sure.  He writes that he may be coming up Boston way any time
now.  Oh, I can swim, but for diving you should see your Uncle Harry--
off the yard-arm--body taut as a whip--nothing like it in any of the old
Greeks' statues.  Plenty of talk about bathing; but diving?  No.  In the
east, must go south to the Persian Gulf to see diving.  The god Hermes
descending on Ogygia--if you could imagine that, you had Uncle Harry--
the shoot outwards, the delicate curve to a straight slant, heels rising
above rigid body while you counted, begad! holding your breath.
Then the plumb drop, like a gannet's--"

Dicky listened, glorious vistas opening before him.  With the fruit
Manasseh brought coffee; and still the boy sat entranced while his
father chatted, glowing with exercise and enjoying a breakfast at every
point excellent.

It was in merest thoughtlessness, no doubt, that having arranged for
Dicky's morning walk, and after smoking a tobacco leaf rolled with an
art of which Manasseh possessed the secret, the Collector so timed his
message to the stables that his groom brought the horse Bayard around to
the Inn door just as the Sabbath bells began tolling for divine worship.
For as a sceptic he was careless rather than militant; ridiculing
religion only in his own set, and when occasion arose, and then without
fanaticism.  For such piety as his mother's he had even a tolerant
respect; and in any event had too much breeding to affront of set
purpose the godly townsfolk of Port Nassau.  At the first note of the
bells he frowned and blamed himself for not having started earlier.
But he had already made appointment by letter to meet the Surveyor and
the Assistant Surveyor at noon on the headland, to measure out and
discuss the site of the proposed fortification; and he was a punctilious
man in observing engagements.

It may be asked how, if civil to other men's scruples, he had come to
make such an appointment for the Sabbath.  He had answered this and (as
he hoped) with suitable apologies in his letter to the surveyor,
Mr. Wapshott: explaining that as His Majesty's business was bringing him
to Port Nassau, so it obliged him to be back at Boston by such-and-such
a date.  He was personally unacquainted with this Mr. Wapshott, who had
omitted the courtesy of calling upon him at the Bowling Green, and whom
by consequence he was inclined to set down as a person of defective
manners.  But Mr. Wapshott was, after all, in the King's service and
would understand its exigencies.

He mounted therefore and rode up the street.  The roadway was deserted;
but along the side-walk, sober families, marching by twos and threes,
turned their heads at the sound of Bayard's hoofs on the cobbles.
The Collector set his face and passed them with a grave look, as of one
absorbed in affairs of moment.  Nevertheless, coming to the whitewashed
Church where the streams of worshippers converged and choking the
porchway overflowed upon the street, he added the courtesy of doffing
his hat as he rode by.  He did this still with a set face, looking
straight between Bayard's ears; but with the tail of his eye caught one
glimpse of a little comedy which puzzled and amused him.

A small rotund, red-gilled man, in bearing and aspect not unlike a
turkey-cock, was mounting the steps of the portico.  Behind this
personage sailed an ample lady of middle age, with a bevy of younger
damsels--his spouse and daughters doubtless.  Suddenly--and as if, at
sight of the Collector, a whisper passed among them--the middle-aged
lady shot out a hand, arrested her husband by the coat-tail and drew him
down a step, while the daughters ranged themselves in semicircle around
him, spreading their skirts and together effacing him from view, much as
a hen covers her offspring.

The Collector laughed inwardly as he replaced his hat, and rode on
speculating what this bit of by-play might mean.  But it had passed out
of his thoughts before he came to the outskirts of the town.



Chapter VIII.


ANOTHER SABBATH-BREAKER.


The road--the same by which he had arrived last night--mounted all the
way and led across the neck of the headland.  His business, however, lay
out upon the headland itself and almost at its extremest verge; and a
mile above the town he struck off to the left where a bridle-path
climbed by a long slant to the ridge.  Half an hour's easy riding
brought him to the top of the ascent, whence he looked down on the long
beach he had travelled yesterday.  The sea lay spread on three sides of
him.  Its salt breeze played on his face; and the bay horse, feeling the
tickle of it in his nostrils, threw up his head with a whinny.
"Good, old boy--is it not?" asked the Collector, patting his neck.
"Suppose we try a breather of it?"

The chine of the headland--of turf, short-cropped by the unceasing
wind--stretched smooth as a racecourse for close upon a mile, with a
gentle dip midway much like the hollow of a saddle.  The Collector ran
his eye along it in search of the two men he had come to meet, but could
spy neither of them.

"Sheltering somewhere from the breeze, maybe," he decided.  "_We_ don't
mind it, hey?  Come along, lad--here's wine for heroes!"

He touched Bayard with the spur, and the good horse started at a
gallop--a rollicking gallop and in the very tune of his master's mood;
and if all Port Nassau had not been at its devotions, the chins of its
burghers might have tilted themselves in wonder at the apparition--a
Centaur, enlarged upon the skyline.

Man and horse at full stretch of the gallop were launching down the dip
of the hollow--the wind singing past on the top note of exhilaration--
when the bay, too well trained to shy, faltered a moment and broke his
stride, as a figure started up from the lee-side of the ridge.

The Collector sailing past and throwing a glance over his shoulder, saw
the figure and lifted a hand.  In another ten strides he reined up
Bayard, turned, and came back at a walk.

He confronted a lean, narrow-chested young man, black-suited, pale of
face, with watery eyes, straw-coloured eyelashes and an underbred smile
that twitched between timidity and assurance.

"Ah?" queried the Collector, eyeing him and disliking him at sight.
"Are you "--doubtfully--"by any chance Mr. Wapshott, the Surveyor?"

"No such luck," answered the watery-eyed young man with an offhand
attempt at familiarity.  "I'm his Assistant--name of Banner--Wapshott's
unwell."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Mr.--Mr. Wapshott--sends word that he's unwell."  Under the Collector's
eye the youth suddenly shifted his manner and became respectful.

"I beg your pardon?" the Collector repeated slowly.  "He 'sends word,'
do you say?  I had not the honour at my Inn--from which I have ridden
straight--to be notified of Mr. Wapshott's indisposition."

Mr. Banner attempted a weak grin and harked back again to familiarity.

"No, I guess not.  The fact is--"

"Excuse me; but would you mind taking your hands out of your pockets?"

"Oh, come!  Why?"  But none the less Mr. Banner removed them.

"Thank you.  You were saying?"

"Well, I guess, between you and me"--Mr. Banner's hands were slipping to
his pockets again but he checked the motion and rested a palm
nonchalantly on either hip--"the old man was a bit too God-fearing to
sign to it."

"You mean," the Collector asked slowly, "that he is not, in fact,
unwell, but has asked you to convey an untruth?"

"You've a downright way of putting it--er--sir" Mr. Banner confessed;
"but you get near enough, I shouldn't wonder.  You see, the old--the
Surveyor is strict upon Lord's Day Observance."

The Collector bent his brows slightly while he smoothed Bayard's mane.
Of a sudden the small scene by the Church porch recurred to him.
"Stay," he said.  "I have not the pleasure of knowing Mr. Wapshott, but
may I attempt to describe him to you?  He is, perhaps, a gentleman of
somewhat stunted growth, but of full habit, and somewhat noticeably red
between the ear and the neck-stock?"

"That hits him."

"--with a wife inclining to portliness and six grown daughters, taller
than their parents and not precisely in their first bloom.  I speak,"
added the Collector, still eyeing his victim, "as to a man of the
world."

"You've seen him anyhow," Mr. Banner nodded.  "That's Wapshott."

"I saw him entering his place of worship; and I note that he thinks what
you call the Lord's Day well worth keeping at the cost of a falsehood.
May I ask, Mr.--"  The Collector hesitated.

"Banner."

"Ah, yes--pardon me!  May I ask, Mr. Banner, how it comes that you have
a nicer sense than your superior of what is due to His Majesty's
Service?"

Mr. Banner laughed uneasily.  "Well, you mightn't guess it from my
looks," he answered with an attempt to ingratiate himself by way of
self-deprecation, "but I am pretty good at working out levels.  I really
am."

"That was not my point, though I shall test you on it presently.
You are, it appears, a somewhat less rigid Sabbatarian than Mr.
Wapshott?"

Hereupon Mr. Banner became cryptic.  "You needn't fear about that," he
answered.  "I have what they call a dispensation; and until you startled
me, I was up here keeping the Lord's Day as well as the best of 'em.
Better, perhaps."

"We will get to business," said the Collector.  "Follow me, please."

He wheeled his horse and, with Mr. Banner walking at his stirrup, rode
slowly out to the end of the headland and as slowly back.  The Collector
asked a question now and then and to every question the young man
responded pat.  He was no fool.  It soon appeared that he had studied
the trajectory of guns, that he had views--and sound ones--on coast
defences, and that by some study of the subject he had come, a while
ago, to a conclusion the Collector took but a few minutes to endorse;
that to build a fort on this headland would be waste of public money.

Professionally, Mr. Banner was tolerable.  The Collector, consulting
with him, forgot the pertness of his address, the distressing twang of
his accent.  He had dismounted, and the pair were busy with a tape,
calling out and checking measurements, when from the southward there was
borne to the Collector's ears the distant crack of a shot-gun.

At the sound of it he glanced up, in time to see Mr. Banner drop the
other end of the tape and run.  Almost willy-nilly he followed, vaguely
wondering if there had happened some accident that called for aid.

Mr. Banner, when the Collector overtook him, had come to a halt
overlooking the long beach, and pointed to a figure--a speck almost--for
it was distant more than a mile.

"That Josselin girl!" panted Mr. Banner.  "I call you to witness!"

The Collector unstrapped his field-glass, which he carried in a
bandolier, adjusted it, and through it scanned the beach.  Yes, in the
distant figure he recognised Ruth Josselin.  She carried a gun--or
rather, stood with the gun grounded and her hands folded, resting on its
muzzle--and appeared to be watching the edge of the breakers, perhaps