, looking out over the long line of
weather-bitten headlands and tumbled rocks, with the blue sea creaming at
their feet, I suppose I must have heaved a sigh, for Carette laughed and
said--

"Ma fe, but you are lively to-day, Phil."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was thinking of the old times when we used to
scramble about here as merry as the rock pipits. They were very happy days,
Carette."

"Yes," she nodded, "they were happy days. But we've grown since then."

"One can't help growing, but I don't know that it makes one any happier."

"Tell me all you did out there," she said, and I lay in the sunshine and
told her of our shipwreck, and of the Florida swamps, and of the great city
of London through which I had come on my way home. And then, somehow, our
talk was of the terrible doings in France, not so very many years before,
of which she had never heard much and I only of late. It was probably the
blue line of coast on the horizon which set us to that, and perhaps
something of a desire on my part to show her that, if she had been learning
things at the Miss Maugers, I also had been learning in the greater world
outside.

It was very different from the talk that usually passes between riders on
Riding Day. For every horse that day is supposed to carry three, though one
of them nestles so close between the others that only bits of him may be
seen at times in their eyes and faces.

But it was all no use. With young Torode in my mind, and Jean Le Marchant's
probable intentions respecting Carette, and Carette's own wonderful growth
which seemed to put us on different levels, and the smallness of my own
prospects,--I could not bring myself to venture any loverly talk, though my
heart was full of loving thoughts and growing intention.

I had been telling her of the doings in Paris, and in Nantes and elsewhere,
and she had been dreadfully interested in it all, when suddenly she jumped
up with a sharp--

"Phil, you are horrid to-day. I believe you have been telling me all these
things just because Monsieur Torode is a Frenchman."

"Torode?--Pardie, I had forgotten Torode for the moment! He is too young to
have had any hand in those doings, anyway."

"All the same he is a Frenchman, and it was Frenchmen who did them."

"And you think I was hitting at him behind his back! It is not behind his
back I will hit him if needs be and the time comes. But I had no thought of
him, Carette. These are things I heard but lately, an