enhance its suggestion. By
some accident in the conversation she had been led to speak of how she
had been nearly captured by pirates in the Mediterranean. They were
becalmed off the African coast, and a boat had rowed out with fruits and
vegetables. The suspicious countenances of this boat's crew did not
strike them at the time. But they were a reconnoitring party, and next
day about four in the afternoon they noticed a vessel propelled by sails
and oars steering straight for them, as if in the intention of running
them down. It paid no attention to the cries of the captain, but came
straight at them, and would have succeeded in its design if the yacht
had not been going through the water faster than the pirates supposed,
so they fell astern, and no one thought any more of them till they
tacked, and they had almost overtaken the yacht, they were hardly
distant more than fifty yards, when their intention was suspected. The
captain put the _Medusa's_ head up to the wind, and she soon began to
leave her pursuer behind.

"We had no arms on board, they were fifty to twenty; the men would have
been massacred, and I should have finished my days in a harem."

Ulick had brought his violin with him, and they walked under the
drooping boughs, she singing and he playing old-world melodies by Lulli
and Rameau. Sometimes a passer-by stopped, and peering through,
discovered them in a hollow sitting under an oak. A snake crawled out of
its hole, and Ulick was about to rush forward to kill it, but Evelyn
laid her hand upon his, and said--

"Let it listen, poor thing. No living thing should meet its death for
its love of music."

"You're no longer the Evelyn Innes that loved Owen Asher."

"I think I have changed a great deal. I was very young when I knew him
first."

She spoke of the influence he had exercised over her, but now his ideas
meant as little as he did himself--it was all far away. Only a little
trick of speech and a turn of phrase remained to recall his passage
through her life. When they returned home she found a letter from him on
the table, and her face clouded as she read his letter, for it announced
an intention to call when he came to town, and to avoid his visit she
thought she would stop in Dulwich. But if she stayed over Saturday, she
would have to go to Mass on Sunday. Last Sunday she escaped by pleading
indisposition. She wondered which she would prefer, to face Owen or to
brave the effect that she knew Ma