Читать книгу The Messenger - Elizabeth Robins - Страница 7

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The thing happened with a remarkable regularity. An expedition would be proposed by Julian, vetoed by Greta. Julian would stir Nan's enthusiasm. Greta would dampen it. Yet Napier soon realized that, if Nan were determined to come, Miss Greta was equally determined to come, and have an eye on her.

So it fell out that the von Schwarzenberg's schemes, first to banish and later to sequestrate the American, were set at naught through the agency of Mr. Julian Grant. With a perfectly careless transparency he showed that no plan of a social nature stood the smallest chance of enlisting him unless it included the American. Whatever Miss Greta described in the future, she must have known that at that moment her only chance of seeing more of Napier was to fall in with Julian's program. After all, exceptional as her position at Kirklamont was acknowledged to be, she was far too level-headed an expert to leave her special charge out of any proposed diversion. Since Madge had to be included, Bobby would come too—when he wasn't off with the head keeper, or fishing with the Pforzheims. If "those children" were added to the party, Miss Greta would be left the freer to cultivate her cautiously conducted friendliness with the secretary. For the rest, Miss Greta bothered herself extraordinarily little about the friend who had come so far for her sake.

Lady McIntyre and Sir William were everything that was kind and hospitable. No later than the third morning after the arrival of Miss Ellis, Lady McIntyre made Sir William stop the motor at the inn and invite the young lady to dine with them that evening.

Poor Julian! It's all up with him, Napier decided, between sympathy and malicious satisfaction, as the girl slipped her long satin cloak off her shoulders in the hall.

Sir William eyed the apparition with the appraising glance of the connoisseur in feminine good looks. Plainly she passed muster.

"Well, Miss Ellis, and shall I ask you, as your compatriots do me when I've been only a few hours in the place, 'What do you think of this country?'"

"If you did, I could tell you a-plenty right now. And a great deal more to-morrow!"

"Why to-morrow?"

"Because—" She interrupted herself to go forward upon the flustered entrance of the hostess. Lady McIntyre's manner was that of the person so inured to being late that she got no good out of being on time. But to this manifestation Napier had long been accustomed. What mildly intrigued him was the manner of the girl. She had put on a different grace along with her evening gown. Her slower movements had even a touch of stateliness, as though to match the trailing elegance of embroidered chiffons.

"Come now, Miss Ellis," Sir William repeated, "why could you tell me more about your impressions after to-morrow?"

"Because Mr. Grant is going to show us a castle. And Greta has promised to take pictures of it. I suppose you know how splendid Greta is at taking pictures? You don't? Well, she's every bit as good as a professional."

"What castle?" Lady McIntyre asked. "Glenfallon?"

Miss von Schwarzenberg had come into the hall, with Madge clinging on her arm.

"We have some delightful foreigners at Glenfallon. Germans. We owe them a great debt of gratitude—" Every one there, except Miss Ellis, knew that Lady McIntyre was going on to tell, as she invariably did to each newcomer, the story of Frau Lenz and the providential result of taking her advice. No one knew better than Madge how this repetition bored and annoyed Miss Greta. When her mother had got as far as "debt of gratitude," Madge threw in the information that "the old man wore goggles! And goes scudding about the firth in the dead of night in a motor launch. Simply bogey, I call it!"

"It is bogey enough," said Miss Greta, gently, "to be nearly blind and not able to sleep."

Julian's entry did not disturb the group at the fire.

"If they're so kind, those Pforzheims, I wish," Miss Ellis went on, "they'd take us out in their launch some time."

"Take us out? Not they!" said Madge.

"They won't? How do you know, miss?" Sir William pulled Madge's ear.

"They won't take people out in their boat. Won't even take me. Asked 'em."

"Meggie!" Lady McIntyre's tone was shocked, but the look she cast round said, "There's a spirited young person for you!"

Bobby came in, and Julian joined the others in time to celebrate the superior attractions of a sailboat over a beastly launch. "I'll take you out and you'll see!" The person who was apparently to do the seeing was Miss Ellis.

Greta von Schwarzenberg caught Napier's eye. "These innocents!" she seemed to say. It was the sort of cautious interchange that punctuated the entire evening. It went on across the flowers during dinner. It went on across the bridge table after dinner. The silent interchange advanced immeasurably the sense of understanding between Miss Greta and Sir William's secretary. Perhaps he owed himself this relaxation. Though why Napier felt something owing, wasn't yet clear to him. What was clear was the surprise, not unmixed with ironic amusement, of the man accustomed to be first at the goal of feminine interest, who sees a person commonly quite out of the running pass him with easy stride.

Napier found in the unusual experience of looking on at this kind of scene, instead of playing the chief part in it, something that appealed both to his sense of the ludicrous and, since the person concerned was Julian, to his generosity. So good for Julian!

At dinner Napier had almost pointedly ignored Miss Ellis. She must talk to Julian. But by no canon of friendship could Napier be asked not to have a little fun out of the spectacle. It ministered too temptingly (especially with Miss Greta opposite) to that sense of the ludicrous which other people's emotional adventures are apt to inspire in us. And the more acutely and exquisitely is this pleasure provided if either of the "parties" has hitherto neglected or been deprived of this element in human experience. Not to know the ropes is to provide amusement to the old salt. Napier, in the character of the Old Salt upon the seas of sentiment, sat and smiled.

It was only when the party broke up that he stood a minute beside the girl, while Julian discussed his sailing plans with the others.

"Why do you look at Miss Greta like that?" Napier demanded in an undertone.

She laughed a little consciously. "Am I looking at her like that?"

"Yes. As if you didn't know whether Julian's plan was a good plan till she'd endorsed it."

"It's quite true," she answered in a rush of confidence. "I don't always follow her advice, but I always wish I had. Heavens! the things Greta has saved me from!"

"And what were some of your greatest escapes?"

"Oh, the usual things. Thinking I'd better marry this one, and then that."

"But why did you think you'd better marry them?"

"Because I thought they'd be so awfully hurt if I didn't." She joined in his laughter, and then seriously: "You must understand they were quite nice too. I rather loved them, as you say over here."

"And would you always be ready to give up the idea of marrying anybody Greta disapproved?"

"I—don't—know," she said.

"Are you really going to motor her to Abergarry?" Napier demanded, after Miss Ellis' departure.

"Oh, you heard that!" Julian laughed. "We thought it was a secret."

"A secret? 'Oh, my, I'd love to see your home!'" he mimicked. "'And is it really three hundred years old? Oh, my!'"

"Look here, Gavan," Julian stopped short in the middle of the moonlit road—"don't say you aren't going to like her."

"I don't see my way not to liking her," he said grudgingly, "but I felt to-night, if she said, 'Oh, my,' again, I should probably wring her neck."

"What's wrong with it? Bless my soul! It's harmless enough. Some of our up-to-date young women swear."

"Oh, if you don't mind, I suppose I must put up with it. But, I say, you aren't going to take her alone to Abergarry, are you?"

"Why not?" Julian was smiling. "Do you want to come?"

"I was only thinking," Napier said, "it was rather marked, your not including the von Schwarzenberg."

"Why should we always have to lug that German woman along?" The question came out with uncommon rancor.

"Nan," Julian went on, already with the proprietary air, "is under the most complete illusion about the von Schwarzenberg." Something watchful came into the face he showed to the moonlight—almost suspicious, totally un-Julianesque. "I thought the reason Nan was going away so meekly to London was that she was dependent on von Schwarzenberg."

Napier said that he, too, had received the impression that Miss Greta was financing her "little friend."

Madge certainly thought so. But Madge has a way of getting to the bottom of things.

She had done it when she came over to say good night to Julian and Nan.

"Miss Greta was very kind to you at school, wasn't she?"

"Very, very kind."

"And she gives you your holidays? Pays your expenses?"

Miss Ellis stared. "Expenses!"—and then broke into a little laugh. "Why, no. You are a funny girl."

Madge threw back her hair. She didn't relish being called a funny girl. She ached to bring this interloper down off her high horse. "Was it a very expensive school Miss von Schwarzenberg sent you to?"

"Sent me—to school? Oh, you haven't understood her. I had my mother to send me. And she sent Greta, too. Mother used to say,"—Miss Ellis was still talking more to Mr. Grant than to the girl—"she considered it a very great privilege to put opportunities in the way of a person like Greta."

Ever since the days of "wet bob" prowess, Julian was at his best, Napier had always thought, on the water. But sailing was the sport he gave his soul to. He forgot his troublesome theories, his quarrel with the world's ordering, and yielded himself with delight to a comradely tussle with the difficulties of navigation, on a rock-bound, "chancy" bit of coast, as he called it.

He looked his best too. The lithe activity of body, the extraordinary quickness of eye, showed the dreaming gone; instead of it, a mastery in alertness. His girlish brown hands, endowed with a steadiness as of steel.

The person who was distinctly not at her best under these conditions was Miss Greta. She had opposed the boating plan as long as she could. The moment she grasped the fact that Nan and Julian, and probably Napier, were going on the water with or without Miss Greta, Miss Greta saw her course with characteristic clarity. She adored sailing! It was only her "sense of responsibility" which had made her hesitate.

Her sense of responsibility, if it was that, went far to spoil her pleasure. She had a curious idea that, though the coast hereabouts was dangerous, the farther out you went the more you tempted fortune. "Those horrchible, rock-bound islands!"

Napier smiled to himself. He did a good deal of covert smiling during those perfect July days, though he didn't pretend to himself that he was specially happy.

The initial reason he gave himself for his state of mind was the breath-taking speed of your inexperienced person, once he is started. While Napier had been giving a secretly humorous welcome to Julian's little distraction, here was that rash youth planning to motor the girl to Abergarry. The only thing, so far as Napier could judge, that prevented Julian from introducing the girl forthwith as his future wife was the trifling circumstance that Sir James and Lady Grant had just telegraphed to say they would be detained a fortnight longer at Bad Nauheim.

There were times when, if Napier had been forced to stand and deliver the reasons for his secret depression, he would have been inclined to say they rose, not out of the fact that Julian was probably going to marry this girl, but out of a growing conviction that she wouldn't "fit in" in the life over here. She was "crude," as Miss Greta had said. And she was too independent; too impulsive; too … what was it? No repose. You never knew where she'd break out next, either in speech or act. It wasn't so much that what she said was wrong, or that what she did was amiss; only both might be unexpected. She kept you on the jump. No thoroughly nice woman, certainly no wife, should keep you on the jump.

Curiously, to Napier's mind, Julian was fashing himself on the score of the influence which Greta von Schwarzenberg exercised over Nan Ellis. "I tell you," he said one night, "the woman's hold over her is uncanny. Part of the trouble lies in Nan's sense of loyalty. It's a drawbridge and a moat and an army—horse, foot, and dragoons. I can't get past it. It's a thing I haven't so far been able to talk openly to her about. And there's only one other thing of that kind,"—Julian's face was quite beautiful in that moment—"she doesn't know yet—unless she guesses."

"Oh, you haven't said anything yet?"—Napier breathed freer.

He was only waiting, Julian said, to get one thing clear. Not his caring! And not any doubt of her. It was only that he couldn't share his wife with anybody, least of all with von Schwarzenberg. "I've got to know what that woman counts for."

"Why don't you find out?" Napier said. His own impatience, his sense of suppressed irritation at the idea of the Schwarzenberg's uncanny hold, surprised Napier—though he would have said it was a natural expression of sympathy for his friend. "I'd find out 'what she counts for' … if it were my affair!"

"I was going to yesterday," Julian said. "I'm thinking I will to-night."

Napier took out his watch. "Ten minutes to eleven," he remarked.

"Hang the Schwarzenberg!" Her inventing to see Nan home in the motor that evening had been a low-down device to cheat Julian Grant of his rights!

But all the same here he was, briskly leading the way along the cross-cut to the inn. "She's often late getting to bed."

"How do you know?" Napier demanded.

"Going over the hill, I've seen the light in her window. … Do you notice," he broke off to say, "how, when we're sailing, Nan always wants to go farther out?" He waited a moment, eager for Napier's tribute to the spirit of the girl. "And not foolhardy either!"

"You are making a very tolerable sailor of her," Napier admitted.

"Steady as any old hand," the other went on eagerly. "And that woman always interfering. 'Be careful, Nanchen; leave it to Mr. Grant.' 'We must turn back now; look how far we've come!'"

There had been, indeed that very afternoon, a spirited argument, in the course of which a number of prickly observations were made, chiefly by Bobby and Miss Greta. With sole exception of the lady, everybody in the boat enthusiastically—Bobby even violently—in favor of going out to the Islands. The project was opposed by the one person with a pertinacity that Julian was sure could mean only one thing. A jealous woman's determination to preserve her ascendancy. To make a test case. She's afraid she's losing hold. She must make a stand somewhere. She makes it at Gull Island. "We aren't to land there if von Schwarzenberg dies for it. I tell you what it is, Gavan. I'll get Nan out to Gull Island to-morrow, or I'll know the reason why!" The face Julian turned to his friend in the starlight was lit with radiances Napier had never thought to see there.

"This way." Julian began to tread his way on in front, among the rocks and underbrush. "I shall go and wait in the gorse by the inn till von Schwarzenberg takes herself off."

A sense of utter joylessness fell on Napier, as for a few minutes longer he kept the pace at Julian's heels. He struggled consciously against the absurd illusion of being left out in the cold. He, with his hosts of friends, his hosts of "affairs," scattered broadcast through the last ten years, the Gavan Napier of enviable worldly lot, had an instant's keen perception of the externality of all these things. He had never lived through an hour like this that was Julian's.

"I'll turn back now," Napier said aloud. The figure in front neither turned nor tarried. On and on.

Napier smiled. His friend was hurrying along under the stars toward a planet mightier for light and leading than any in the heavens—a candle set in the window of a girl.

Before Napier had finished sorting the next morning's letters, the Grants' chauffeur drove up to Kirklamont with a note.

Must see you before the others come. Car will wait and bring you to the landing.

J. G.

The slight figure was prancing up and down the strip of sand between encircling rocks. Never a look toward his beloved boat, riding with transfigured sails at the entrance to the cove. As far away as Napier could see his friend, he felt the nervous force that was being expended in that absorbed prowl.

"I nearly routed you out in the middle of the night," was the way Julian began.

"You remember last night, just to prevent me from taking Nan home, that woman took Nan home herself? Well, she stayed at the 'Queen' a mortal hour. As if that wasn't enough in all conscience, Nan was for seeing her home! 'No, darling, no!' I heard the von Schwarzenberg say. And then with that acrid break in her sugariness, 'I don't want to be taken half-way!'

"There was something I lost. Then, 'My dear child,' I heard her say, 'you must allow me here to know what is appropriate, what is expected. What isn't expected, is that an inexperienced girl, strange to the place, should be running about dark roads this time of night. You would be misunderstood. I should be misunderstood if I let you.' Then Nan was, 'So sorry!' and 'Forgive me, Greta!' They kissed. Nan went slowly back to the inn. Then, instead of turning into the Kirklamont footpath, Schwarzenberg came up the hill. I laughed to myself to think of her surprise when she should come across me. But she turned to the left and cut across the west flank. I thought maybe the woman had got bewildered, going in unaccustomed places at night. But she wasn't walking like a bewildered person at all. Do you know what she was walking like? Like a person who has done the same thing before. She was making straight as a die for that old shepherd's hut the bracken cutters use. She went into that hut and stayed there three quarters of an hour."

"No!"

"And when she came out, Ernst Pforzheim was with her. They came along so near me that I began to be sorry for them. They were heading straight for a nasty jar when they should see me. Well, they didn't see me. They went by not five yards away from the stone pile I was leaning against—talking hard in German, till I lost sound and sight of them."

"God bless me!"

"I'm sorry, Gavan." To Napier's amazement, Julian was looking at him with pitying eyes. Evidently, he thought, in spite of his friend's air of humorous detachment, he had been cherishing some genuine feeling for Miss Greta.

The idea, especially in view of the revelation, offended Napier's amour propre. "I hadn't thought it necessary to tell anybody," he said, "but I knew there was—or there had been—a Pforzheim friendship under the rose."

"You didn't think it necessary to tell. … "

"I was in the Schwarzenberg's confidence before … all this. I couldn't give her away, could I?"

"You needn't have given her away. The merest hint would have warned me. You might have thought of Nan!" he burst out passionately.

"Oh, everybody can't be thinking of Nan, to the exclusion of everybody else."

The other man looked into Napier's eyes. And Napier laughed out. It was so patent that old Julian, newly enlightened as to the part love plays, had conceived the idea that his poor friend was the victim of a tenderness for Miss Greta.

Gavan caught in the toils of a woman like that!—the tragedy of it softened Julian. His face cleared. The motor was coming back with the others.

But the only others who were in the car were Madge, distinctly scowling, and Bobby, cheerful as usual. "Miss Greta's got a headache. Not coming!" the boy called out.

Julian was in the car as soon as they were out. "I'll go and get Miss Ellis."

"You can't. She won't leave 'her friend'!" said Madge, jerking her head away.

They didn't sail that day.

Julian haunted Kirklamont all the afternoon and evening. No sign of either lady.

"I shouldn't have thought she would be so obvious!" Julian burst out, as he and Napier sat smoking at the far end of the terrace. "To stick in bed all day just so as to prevent Nan—"

"What's the good? There's always to-morrow."

"She thinks twenty-four hours will block the business pretty completely, and maybe even take the edge off Nan's keenness about the island for good. Anyway,"—his forehead drew up into lines of anxiety—"twenty-four hours will give her time to draw the reins tighter. She's drawing the reins tighter this minute." Julian looked up at the pile of Kirklamont, somewhere in whose innermost Nan Ellis was in attendance on a so-called sick-bed instead of being, where she ought to be, out sailing with Julian. "I'll tell you what it is, Gavan,"—he drove a fist into the palm of his hand. "You may take my word for it I'll get Nan Ellis out to Gull Island to-morrow somehow. You see if I don't."

"You said that last night."

"No. I said last night I'd get her out there or I'd know the reason why. Well, now I know the reason against it." He nodded toward the two windows whose blinds were drawn.

"The reason doesn't seem to mind so much your wandering about the mainland with her 'little friend,'" Napier reflected out loud. "She seems to have a special scunner against islands. Why?"

"Especially against Gull Island," Julian agreed. And he too echoed, "Why?"

To the general surprise, Nan Ellis had risen early and vanished. Miss Greta had fallen asleep and, opening her eyes at eight—no Nan. The disappearance exercised a strikingly curative effect upon Miss Greta. She rose and dressed, and herself conducted a search. "I know!" she said at last. "Nan has gone to get fresh clothes. She has a mania for never wearing twice what she calls a 'shirt waist.'"

Sir William had already left the breakfast table, and every one but Napier had finished. Still Miss Greta lingered. "She must come soon—after leaving me like that."

And come she did; across the lawn, in full view of the dining-room windows, walking at Julian Grant's side, looking up into his face; Julian, talking with great earnestness, his right hand, palm upward, now raised, now lowered, with that weighing action Napier knew so well. They parted when they reached the path, and Nan came on alone, "Julian," she announced with no apparent self-consciousness in use of his name—"Julian's coming back to take me for a sail, whether anybody else wants to go or not."

"Oh, really!" Miss Greta exchanged a look with Napier.

"Thank you!" said Madge at her prickly pertest. "Since you are so pressing—"

"We must wait for the letters!" It was so that Miss Greta, coming out into the hall, announced her intention of being one of the party. So, too, she betrayed her cherished hope that Napier might join them.

"Of course Gavan must go." He, Sir William, wasn't going to be a spoil-sport! And he announced the fact with a roguish significance that made Miss Greta cast down her eyes. When she lifted them, there was the bag. It proved a light post. Sir William tore open two or three envelopes while he stood there.

"Anything in the papers?" Miss Greta asked Napier.

A glance at the outsides of her own letters seemed to satisfy her. Did she read other people's with the same facility?

"The papers don't seem to have come," Napier answered.

"Not come! I wonder why!" She listened while he explained, in the easy British fashion, "that now and then the fella at the Junction would forget to throw the papers out."

"And you stand that? Sir William doesn't get the man dismissed?"

"What the devil … !" Sir William broke out. Apparently there were things which Sir William could not stand! One of them was in the letter he held as he went fuming toward the library, with Napier at his heels.

"Shut the door! Look here. The fact of that confidential memorandum being in the hands of the British Government is known. Known in the Hamburg shipping center, of all things! Here, you see what they say." Sir William thrust under the eyes of his secretary the highly disconcerting letter he had just received from the Board of Trade. "Well—? It certainly didn't happen in my department. Damned impudence!" Sir William burst out, "to suppose that any of our people. … " He glared at an invisible cross-examiner, "It's never been out of our hands!"

"Except," Napier threw in, "to come into the translator's."

"Translator!" his chief echoed pettishly. Sir William, like many men not at home in foreign languages, quite particularly objected to being reminded of the fact. "Translator! They aren't worrying about the translator. It's what you're here for."

"I wasn't the translator of that particular document. You gave it to Miss von Schwarzenberg to do."

"To be sure! But remembering that doesn't help us."

"I wonder!" said Gavan Napier.

"Come, come!" said Sir William. "It's annoying to have secret information go astray, but it needn't warp our common sense."

Napier's duty, as he saw it, to try to turn his chief's mind toward a possible culprit under his own roof was discounted at the start, as the younger man well knew, by Sir William's chivalrous view of women. That wasn't really what was the matter with his view, but that was the name it went by. Sir William had married his butterfly lady for her painted wings. Finding but little underneath the blue and golden dust, he loyally concluded that the only difference between Lady McIntyre and other men's wives was a difference in the hue and the degree of their gold and blue—or their leaden and dun, as the case might be.

Even if women were told things, they could never distinguish what was important from what was trivial, and they forgot as quickly the precise point as the general bearing. Sir William had lived many happy years in the comfort of these convictions.

"I tell you, Gavan, the use of that document would argue a relationship with affairs quite grotesque to suppose on the part of any woman."

The thought of the Pforzheims flashed across Napier, bringing a kind of relief. Miss Greta might quite innocently have remembered and retailed enough to Mr. Ernst for him to turn to account.

For the first hour and a half of that memorable sail, the Kelpie ran lightly before a delicate breeze. An eager girl at the prow, a watchful woman at the stern, youth and manhood on board—a cargo of fair hopes borne along under skies of summer to airs of extreme sweetness. It was the very light opera of seafaring and of life. No faintest hint of the weightier merchandise—for which mankind takes risks.

Julian looked back at the receding coast-line. "How gloriously Glenfallon stands!" He quoted, "'A great sea mark outstanding every flaw!'"

Innocent as it was, the comment seemed not to please Miss Greta. She thought the castle was "probably not so great a 'sea mark' as it looks to us."

Julian assured her that you could see Glenfallon tower, "Well, a long way beyond those cruisers."

"What cruisers?" All eyes except Miss Greta's swept the horizon. And all found it featureless, till Bobby picked out a couple of dun-gray shapes.

Nan looked at Julian with frank admiration. "My! what wonderful eyes you must have! I can't see a thing!"

"Pooh! Mr. Grant isn't a patch on Ernst Pforzheim," said Bobby.

"Oh, you and your Pforzheims!" Julian scoffed.

With his Scotch tenacity, Bobby stuck to his guns. "All I'm saying is, Mr. Ernst can do better than see a ship when it's so far away nobody else knows there's a ship there at all. He can tell you what she is!"

"Any one with good sight," said Miss Greta, "can be trained." In German schools, she went on, a study of silhouettes was just part of the ordinary discipline of the eye.

Julian was deflecting Madge's course to the left of Gull Island.

"Oh, do let us go a little nearer!" the girl implored.

"No!" came from Miss Greta's cushions in the stern; "the … the channel isn't safe!"

Julian began to tell about bird-nesting over there when he was a boy. And a cave the smugglers had used—

"Oh, my!" came the familiar note. "We simply must go and explore!"

"No," said Miss Greta decisively. "No!"

Napier caught Julian's eye. "Why?" they both asked silently.

And now even the devoted Nan was ready with, "Dearest Greta, why not?"

"Because it—it's too dangerous, I tell you!" She had carried a handkerchief to her lips. Over the handkerchief the eyes looked out to the Gull rocks, with an expression not easy to define. But Napier felt as clearly as ever he'd felt anything in his life: she will do something to prevent those two from wandering away together on Gull Island. What would she do? What could she do? He lay in the boat and speculated.

Certainly Miss Greta's conception of her responsibility for the safety of her charges had produced a curious agitation in that lady. While the others were arguing, she dashed her handkerchief down from her lips, that were seen to be trembling, and called out roughly, "Madge! I forbid it!"

"Why … Miss Greta?" said the astonished girl, staring at her altered idol with wide eyes.

"You must turn back," said the lady, her bosom heaving.

Whether Julian didn't hear, or wouldn't hear, Napier didn't know. Nan Ellis had turned to look at the island. She leaned far out over the bow. Motionless as a figure-head, she faced the islands and the outer sea. The wind drowned Greta's protest—it blew the girl's loose hair straight back—it made a booming in the sail.

"Mr. Grant, I refuse to let them land!"

Julian stared at her. Miss Greta made an effort to speak in a more normal tone. "It's too—too dangerous," she said hoarsely.

"Oh, very well," Julian said. "They can stay in the boat."

"Then why,"—her voice rose again—"why are you going so near? You just want to tantalize them!"

"They won't be half so tantalized, will you, Madge, if somebody goes and brings back the news. I haven't been there for a dozen years—nor anybody else, I should say."

The boat was cutting through the bright water at a great speed. The wind sang in the sail.

Miss von Schwarzenberg half rose. "Stop!" she cried out. "I—I'm dizzy—I'm sick!" She lurched; she flung out her hands. Before anybody had time to catch her, or, indeed, had any conception of the need to, Miss von Schwarzenberg had lost her balance. She was over the side of the boat.

Napier sprang to his feet just a second too late. Greta, in five fathoms of water, was crying for help.

The first Nan knew of what had happened, Madge was screaming with horror and Julian was tearing off his coat. But Napier was nearer. Miss Greta needn't have lifted her arms out of the water as the foolish do, calling frantically, "Mr. Napier! Mr. Nap—!" before, most horribly, she disappeared. Napier was out of the boat and swimming toward a hat. He dived and came up, supporting a dripping yellow head on one arm.

Julian helped to lift Miss Greta in. They covered her with coats. The two girls chafed her hands. Julian, silent with remorse, as fast as he could was bringing the Water Kelpie home.

As Napier supported Miss Greta down the little gangway, she pressed his arm. Under her breath, "You've saved my life," she murmured. "For all that's left of it, I shall remember."

She wouldn't wait till they could get a motor. In her clinging, soaking clothes she insisted on walking those three quarters of a mile from the landing to Kirklamont.

Oh, Greta von Schwarzenberg was game, for all her pardonable panic at the sudden prospect of death. Napier admitted as much to Miss Ellis, as the heroine of the day hurried on before them, nobly concerned to tone down the story with which Madge and Bobby were so pleasantly occupied in freezing their mother's blood.

Nan lingered a moment at Julian's side in the lobby, but it was to Napier she was talking. "'Peril of death'?" she repeated, under cover of the repercussions of Lady McIntyre's consternation and thankfulness. "Why do you say that?"

"Well, I don't want to make much of the little I did—but suppose I hadn't been there, and suppose Julian couldn't swim!"

"But Greta can."

Both men stared at the girl incredulously.

"It's none the less good of you—what you did. And very horrid for poor Greta, with all her nice clothes on—"

"She can swim?"

"Like a fish."