She thought, with a half-smile, of yesterday's adventure. What importance that foolish Tabitha gave to so simple an incident; the merest commonplace courtesy, necessitated by circumstances; and only because the person who had been commonly courteous was Richard Hulbert, thirteenth Baron Lostwithiel. Thirteenth Baron! There lay the distinction. These Cornish folks worshipped antique lineage. Tabitha would have thought very little of a mushroom peer's civility, although he had sent her mistress home in a chariot and four. She was no worshipper of wealth, and she turned up her blunt old nose at Mr. Crowther, of Glenaveril—the great new red-brick mansion which had sprung up like a fungus amidst the woods only yesterday—because he had made his money in trade, albeit his trade had been upon a large scale, and altogether genteel and worthy to be esteemed—a great cloth factory at Stroud, which was said to have clad half the army at one period of modern history.
Poor, foolish Tabitha! What would she have thought of the tea-drinking in that lovely old room, mysteriously beautiful in the light of a wood fire—the playful, uncertain light which glorifies everything? What would she have thought of those walls of books—richly bound books, books in sombre brown, big books and little books, from floor to ceiling? A room which made those poor little oak bookcases in the cottage parlour something to blush for. What would Tabitha have thought of his deferential kindness—that tone of deepest consideration with which such men treat all women, even the old and uncomely? She could hardly have helped admiring his good manners, whatever dark things she might have been told about his earlier years.
Why should he not have a yacht? It seemed the fittest life for a man without home ties; a man still young, and with no need to labour at a profession. What better life could there be than that free wandering from port to port over a romantic sea?—and to Isola all seas were alike mysterious and romantic.
She dawdled away the morning; she sculled against the stream for nearly three hours, and then let her boat drift down the river to the garden above the towpath. It was long past her usual time for luncheon when she moored her boat to the little wooden steps, leaving it for Thomas, the gardener, to pull up into the boat-house. She had made up her mind that if Lostwithiel troubled himself to make any inquiry about her health he would call in the morning.
She had guessed rightly. Tabitha was full of his visit, and his wondrous condescension. He had called at eleven o'clock, on his way to the railway station at Fowey. He called in the most perfect of T carts, with a pair of bright bays. Tabitha had opened the door to him. He had asked quite anxiously about Mrs. Disney's health. He had walked round the garden with Tabitha and admired everything, and had told her that Major Disney had a better gardener than any he had at the Mount, after which he had left her charmed by his amiability. And so this little episode in Isola's life came to a pleasant end, leaving no record but his lordship's card, lying like a jewel on the top of less distinguished names in the old Indian bowl.
CHAPTER III.
"OH MOMENT ONE AND INFINITE!"
Isola fancied that her adventure was all over and done with after that ceremonious call of inquiry; but in so narrow a world as that of Trelasco it was scarcely possible to have seen the last of a man who lived within three miles; and she and Lord Lostwithiel met now and then in the course of her solitary rambles. The walk into Fowey, following the old disused railway, was almost her favourite, and one which she had occasion to take oftener than any other, since Tabitha was a stay-at-home person, and expected her young mistress to do all the marketing, so that Isola had usually some errand to take her into the narrow street on the hillside above the sea. It was at Fowey that she oftenest met Lostwithiel. His yacht, the Vendetta, was in the harbour under repairs, and he went down to look at the work daily, and often dawdled upon the deck till dusk, watching the carpenters, or talking to his captain. They had been half over the world together, master and man, and were almost as familiar as brothers. The crew were half English and half foreign; and it was a curious mixture of languages in which Lostwithiel talked to them. They were most of them old hands on board the Vendetta, and would have stood by the owner of the craft if he had wanted to sail her up the Phlegethon.
She was a schooner of two hundred and fifty tons, built for speed, and with a rakish rig. She had cost, with her fittings, her extra silk sails for racing, more money than Lostwithiel cared to remember; but he loved her as a man loves his mistress, and if she were costly and exacting, she was no worse than other mistresses, and she was true as steel, which they are not always; and so he felt that he had money's worth in her. He showed her to Isola one evening from the promontory above the harbour, where she met him in the autumn sundown. Her work at the butcher's and the grocer's being done, she had gone up to that airy height by Point Neptune to refresh herself with a long look seaward before she went back to her home in the valley. Lostwithiel took her away from the Point, and made her look down into the harbour.
"Isn't she a beauty?" he asked, pointing below.
Her inexperienced eyes roamed about among the boats, colliers, fishing-boats, half a dozen yachts of different tonnage.
"Which is yours?" she asked.
"Which? Why, there is only one decent boat in the harbour. The schooner."
She saw which boat he meant by the direction in which he flourished his walking-stick, but was not learned in distinctions of rig. The Vendetta, being under repair, did not seem to her especially lovely.
"Have you pretty cabins?" she asked childishly.
"Oh yes, they're pretty enough; but that's not the question. Look at her lines. She skims over the water like a gull. Ladies seem to think only what a boat looks like inside. I believe my boat is rather exceptional, from a lady's point of view. Will you come on board and have a look at her?"
"Thanks, no; I couldn't possibly. It will be dark before I get home as it is."
"But it wouldn't take you a quarter of an hour, and we could row you up the river in no time—ever so much faster than you could walk."
Isola looked frightened at the very idea.
"Not for the world!" she said. "Tabitha would think I had gone mad. She would begin to fancy that I could never go out without over-staying the daylight, and troubling you to send me home."
"Ah, but it is so long since you were last belated," he said, in his low caressing voice, with a tone that was new to her and different from all other voices; "ages and ages ago—half a lifetime. There could be no harm in being just a little late this mild evening, and I would row you home—myself, under the new moon. Look at her swinging up in the grey blue there above Polruan. She looks like a fairy boat, anchored in the sky by that star hanging a fathom below her keel. I look at her, and wish—wish—wish!"
He looked up, pale in the twilight, with dark deep-set eyes, of which it was never easy to read the expression. Perhaps that inscrutable look made those sunken and by no means brilliant eyes more interesting than some much handsomer eyes—interesting with the deep interest that belongs to the unknowable.
"Good night," said Isola. "I'm afraid that I shall be very late."
"Good night. You would be earlier if you would trust to the boat."
He held out his hand, and she gave him hers, hesitatingly for the first time in their acquaintance. It was after this parting in the wintry sundown that she first began to look troubled at meeting him.
The troubled feeling grew upon her somehow. In a life so lonely and uneventful trifles assume undue importance. She tried to avoid him, and on her journeys to Fowey she finished her business in the village street and turned homewards without having climbed the promontory by that rugged walk she loved so well. It needed some self-denial to forego that keen pleasure of standing on the windy height and gazing across the western sea towards Ushant and her native province; but she knew that Lord Lostwithiel spent a good deal of his time lounging on the heights above the harbour, and she did not want to meet him again.
Although she lived her quiet life in the shortening days for nearly a month without meeting him, she was not allowed to forget his existence. Wherever she went people talked about him and speculated about him. Every detail of his