pleasantness of the situation, said she would wait in the orchard till
she was called.

From it one could get a beautiful view across the River Rance, to the
wooded slopes beside Dinard, and, finding a seat beneath a lime-tree,
Barbara sat down. She had been there about a quarter of an hour, and was
almost asleep, when she heard stealthy footsteps coming through the grass
beside her, and the next moment her startled eyes fell upon the
solicitor's son of Neuilly remembrance!

She got rather a fright at first, but he certainly got a much worse one;
and before he had recovered it had flashed across her mind quite clearly
that the man who was at that moment talking to Mademoiselle Therese, was
the solicitor himself. Before she could move from her place, the son had
cast himself down on his knees, and was begging her incoherently to spare
him and his father--not to inform against them. The thought of going to
prison, he said, would kill him, as it had his mother, as it nearly had
his sister; and if she would spare them, he would take his father away at
once.

To see the boy crying there like a child almost made Barbara give way and
let things go as they liked; but then she remembered how meanly his
father had cheated the people in Neuilly--a widow's family too--and what
a life he seemed to have led his own wife and children; then, calling to
mind his horrid manner and cruel, sensuous face, she steeled herself
against him.

"I shall certainly inform against your father," she said gravely. "And I
think the best thing that you and your sister can do, is to get away at
once, before it is too late."

The boy wrung his hands. "My sister has gone already," he moaned, "to
some Scotch relations--simple people--who said they would take her in if
she would have nothing more to do with our father. But I could not
go--there was money only for one."

Barbara looked at the pathetic figure before her, and suddenly forgot all
her promises not to get entangled in any more plots or other dangerous
enterprises, and almost before she realised what she was doing, she was
scribbling a message in French on the back of an envelope.

From where they stood they could see the little house of Mademoiselle
Vire, and the entrance to the lane in which it stood. Pointing out the
roof of the house to her companion, she told him to run there with the
note, and, if the people let him in, to wait until she came.

She felt it was a very bold, and