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
horr_chi_ble, 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."