ch was swarthy, but rather handsome in itself, wore something
that may have been a slightly embarrassed smile, but had too much the
appearance of a sneer.

Whether this apparition was a tramp or a trespasser, or a friend of some
of the fishers or woodcutters, Barbara Vane was quite unable to guess.
He removed his hat, still with his unaltered and rather sinister smile,
and said civilly: "Excuse me. The Squire asked me to call." Here he
caught sight of Martin, the woodman, who was shifting along the path,
thinning the thin trees; and the stranger made a familiar salute with
one finger.

The girl did not know what to say. "Have you--have you come about
cutting the wood?" she asked at last.

"I would I were so honest a man," replied the stranger. "Martin is, I
fancy, a distant cousin of mine; we Cornish folk just round here are
nearly all related, you know; but I do not cut wood. I do not cut
anything, except, perhaps, capers. I am, so to speak, a jongleur."

"A what?" asked Barbara.

"A minstrel, shall we say?" answered the newcomer, and looked up at her
more steadily. During a rather odd silence their eyes rested on each
other. What she saw has been already noted, though by her, at any rate,
not in the least understood. What he saw was a decidedly beautiful woman
with a statuesque face and hair that shone in the sun like a helmet of
copper.

"Do you know," he went on, "that in this old place, hundreds of years
ago, a jongleur may really have stood where I stand, and a lady may
really have looked over that wall and thrown him money?"

"Do you want money?" she asked, all at sea.

"Well," drawled the stranger, "in the sense of lacking it, perhaps, but
I fear there is no place now for a minstrel, except nigger minstrel. I
must apologize for not blacking my face."

She laughed a little in her bewilderment, and said: "Well, I hardly
think you need do that."

"You think the natives here are dark enough already, perhaps," he
observed calmly. "After all, we are aborigines, and are treated as
such."

She threw out some desperate remark about the weather or the scenery,
and wondered what would happen next.

"The prospect is certainly beautiful," he assented, in the same
enigmatic manner. "There is only one thing in it I am doubtful about."

While she stood in silence he slowly lifted his black stick like a long
black finger and pointed it at the peacock trees above the wood. And a
queer feeling of disquiet fell on