e had a notion that Seton preferred his absence, and he
would not go where he felt himself to be an intruder.

Nevertheless, the primary fascination had not ceased to act upon him; the
glamour of the girl's beauty was still in his eyes something more than
earthly. And there came a time when Bernard Merefleet listened with
unconscious craving for the high, unmodulated voice, and smiled with a
tender indulgence over the curiously naive audacity which once had made
him shrink.

As for Mab, she was too eagerly interested in various matters to give
more than a passing thought to the fact that the man she called Big Bear
had laid aside his surliness. If she thought about it at all, it was only
to conclude that their daily intercourse had worn away the outer crust of
his shyness.

She was always busy--in and out of the fishermen's cottages, where she
was welcomed as an angel--to and fro on a hundred schemes, all equally
interesting and equally absorbing. And Merefleet was called upon to
assist. She singled him out for her friendship because he was as one
apart and without interests. She drew him into her own bubbling life. She
laughed at him, consulted him, enslaved him.

All innocently she wove her spell about this man. He was lonely, she
knew; and she, in her ardent, great-souled pity for all such, was willing
to make cheerful sacrifice of her own time and strength if thus she might
ease but a little the burden that galled a fellow-traveller's shoulders.

Merefleet came upon her once standing in the sunshine with Mrs. Quiller's
baby in her arms. She beckoned him to speak to her. "Come here if you
aren't afraid of babies!" she said, displaying her charge. "Look at him,
Big Bear! He's three weeks old to-day. Isn't he fine?"

"What do you know about babies?" said Merefleet, with his eyes on her
lovely flushed face.

She nodded in her sprightly fashion, but her eyes were far away on the
distant horizon, and her soul with them. "I know a lot, Big Bear," she
said.

Merefleet watched her, well pleased with the sight. She stood rocking to
and fro. Her gaze was fixed and tender.

"I wonder what you see," Merefleet said, after a pause.

Her eyes came back at once to her immediate surroundings.

"Shall I tell you, Big Bear?" she said.

"Yes," said Merefleet, marvelling at the radiance of her face.

And, her voice hushed to a whisper, she moved a pace nearer to him and
told him.

"Just a little baby friend of mine who l