tle, ran
past me into the open, and stood on the bracken in his stockinged
feet. A little patch of fog still smoked on the shining beach of Tean;
a scarf of it was twisted about the granite bosses of St. Helen's; and
for the rest the moonlight sparkled upon the headlands and was spilled
across miles of placid sea. There was a froth of water upon the Golden
Ball, but no sign of the schooner sunk among its weeds.

"My father, however, and the two boatmen hurried down to the shore,
while I was despatched with the news to Merchant's Point. My mother
asked Mr. Lovyes his name, that I might carry it with me. But he spoke
in a dreamy voice, as though he had not heard her.

"'There were eight of the crew. Four were below, and I doubt if the
four on deck could swim.'

"I ran off on my errand, and, coming back a little later with a bottle
of cordial waters, found Mr. Lovyes still standing in the moonlight.
He seemed not to have moved a finger. I gave him the bottle, with a
message that any who were rescued should be carried to Merchant's
Point forthwith, and that he himself should go down there in the
morning.

"'Who taught you Latin?' he asked suddenly.

"'Mrs. Lovyes taught me the rudiments,' I began; and with that he led
me on to talk of her, but with some cunning. For now he would divert
me to another topic and again bring me back to her, so that it all
seemed the vagrancies of a boy's inconsequent chatter.

"Mrs. Lovyes, who was remotely akin to the Lord Proprietor, had come
to Tresco three years before, immediately after her marriage, and, it
was understood, at her husband's wish. I talked of her readily, for,
apart from what I owed to her bounty, she was a woman most sure to
engage the affections of any boy. For one thing she was past her
youth, being thirty years of age, tall, with eyes of the kindliest
grey, and she bore herself in everything with a tender toleration,
like a woman that has suffered much.

"Of the other topics of this conversation there was one which later I
had good reason to remember. We had caught a shark twelve feet long at
the Poul that day, and the shark fairly divided my thoughts with Mrs.
Lovyes.

"'You bleed a fish first into the sea,' I explained. 'Then you bait
with a chad's head, and let your line down a couple of fathoms. You
can see your bait quite clearly, and you wait.'

"'No doubt,' said Robert; 'you wait.'

"'In a while,' said I, 'a dim lilac shadow floats through the clear