"Oh!" said Margaret, and Miss Penny's eyes danced carmagnoles.

"In connection with a story, you know. One likes to get one's legal
points all right. In any case, as I was just about to tell Miss Penny
for the benefit of her criminal friend, there would be lots of red
tape to unwind before they could do anything, and this little isle of
Sark is the quaintest place in the world in the matter of its own old
observances and their integrity, and the rejection of new ideas. Mr.
Pixley does not know you are here, of course?"

"Not much, or he'd have been over by special boat long since," said
Miss Penny. "We managed it splendidly."

"And how long?" began Graeme, in pursuance of his train of thought,
but stopped short at sound of the words, since they bore distant
resemblance to a curiosity which seemed to himself impertinent.

But Miss Penny knew no such compunctions. She did not want to miss one
jot or tittle of her enjoyment of the situation.

"About six months," said she quickly.

"Well, I should think we"--how delightful to him that "we," and how
Miss Penny rejoiced in it!--"could hold them at bay for that length of
time. The machinery of the law is slow and cumbersome at best, and in
this case, I imagine, it would not be difficult to put a few
additional spokes in its wheels."

If his face was anything to go by there were many more questions he
would have liked to put--judicial questions, you understand, for a
fuller comprehension of the case. But he would not venture them yet.
He had got ample food for reflection for the moment, and his hopes
stood high.

Never for him had there been a dinner equal to that one. Better ones
he had partaken of in plenty. But the full board and the quality of
the faring are not the only things, nor by any means the chief things,
that go to the making of a feast.

The nearest approach to it had been that dinner with the Whitefriars,
at which he first met Margaret Brandt, and that did not come within
measurable distance of this one.

XII

"Will you be pleased to tek your dinner with the leddies again
to-night?" asked Mrs. Carre, as she gave Graeme his breakfast next
morning.

"I would be delighted," he said doubtfully. "But are you quite sure
they would wish it, Mrs. Carre."

"But you did get on all right with them," she said, eyeing him
wonderingly. "They are very nice leddies, I am sure."

"Oh, we got on first rate. We didn't quarrel over the food or fall out
in a