masts above the trees. The sea-gulls flew wide and afar. Gilliatt had
heard his mother say that women could love men; that such things
happened sometimes. He remembered it; and said within himself, "Who
knows, may not Deruchette love me?" Then a feeling of sadness would come
upon him; he would say, "She, too, thinks of me in her turn. It is
well." He remembered that Deruchette was rich, and that he was poor: and
then the new boat appeared to him an execrable invention. He could never
remember what day of the month it was. He would stare listlessly at the
great bees, with their yellow bodies and their short wings, as they
entered with a buzzing noise into the holes in the wall.

One evening Deruchette went in-doors to retire to bed. She approached
her window to close it. The night was dark. Suddenly, something caught
her ear, and she listened. Somewhere in the darkness there was a sound
of music. It was some one, perhaps, on the hill-side, or at the foot of
the towers of Vale Castle, or, perhaps, further still, playing an air
upon some instrument. Deruchette recognised her favourite melody,
"Bonnie Dundee," played upon the bagpipe. She thought little of it.

From that night the music might be heard again from time to time at the
same hours, particularly when the nights were very dark.

Deruchette was not much pleased with all this.

IV

"A serenade by night may please a lady fair,
But of uncle and of guardian let the troubadour beware."

_Unpublished Comedy_

Four years passed away.

Deruchette was approaching her twenty-first year, and was still
unmarried. Some writer has said that a fixed idea is a sort of gimlet;
every year gives it another turn. To pull out the first year is like
plucking out the hair by the roots; in the second year, like tearing the
skin; in the third, like breaking the bones; and in the fourth, like
removing the very brain itself.

Gilliatt had arrived at this fourth stage.

He had never yet spoken a word to Deruchette. He lived and dreamed near
that delightful vision. This was all.

It happened one day that, finding himself by chance at St. Sampson, he
had seen Deruchette talking with Mess Lethierry at the door of the
Bravees, which opens upon the roadway of the port. Gilliatt ventured to
approach very near. He fancied that at the very moment of his passing
she had smiled. There was nothing impossible in that.

Deruchette still heard, from time to time, the soun