Merefleet was silent.
"I"m not, you know," she said, after a momentary pause. "I"m years older than Bert, anyhow."
"Oh, come!" said Merefleet.
"Figuratively, of course," she explained.
"I understand," said Merefleet. And there was a silence.
Suddenly she laughed again merrily.
"May I share the joke?" asked Merefleet.
"You won"t see it," she returned. "I"m laughing at you, Big Bear. You are just too quaint for anything."
Merefleet did not see the joke, but he did not ask for an explanation.
Seton himself strolled on to the terrace and joined them directly after; and Mab began to shiver and went indoors.
The two men sat together for some time, talking little. Seton seemed preoccupied and Merefleet became sleepy. It was he who at length proposed a move.
Seton rose instantly. "Mr. Merefleet," he said rather awkwardly, "I want to say a word to you."
Merefleet waited in silence.
"Concerning my cousin," Seton proceeded. "You will probably misread my motive for saying this. But nevertheless it must be said. It is not advisable that you should become very intimate with her."
He brought out the words with a jerk. It had been a difficult thing to say, but he was not a man to shrink from difficulties. Having said it, he waited quietly for the result.
Merefleet paused a moment before he spoke. Seton had surprised him, but he did not show it.
"I shall not misread your motive," he said, "as I seldom speculate on matters that do not concern me. But allow me to say that I consider your warning wholly uncalled for."
"Exactly," said Seton, "I expected you to say that. Well, I am sorry. It is quite impossible for me to explain myself. I hope for your sake you will never be placed in the position in which I am now. I a.s.sure you it is anything but an enviable one."
His manner, blunt and direct, appealed very strongly to Merefleet. He said nothing, however, and they went in together in unbroken silence.
Mab did not reappear that night.
CHAPTER VIII
A fortnight pa.s.sed away and Merefleet was still at the hotel at Old Silverstrand. Mab was there also, the idol of the fisher-folk, and an unfailing source of interest and admiration to casual visitors at the hotel.
Merefleet, though he had become a privileged acquaintance, was still wholly unenlightened with regard to the circ.u.mstances which had brought her to the place under Seton"s escort.
As time went on, it struck Merefleet that these two were a somewhat incongruous couple. They dined together and they usually boated together in the afternoon--this last item on account of Mab"s pa.s.sion for the sea; but beyond this they lived considerably apart. Neither seemed to seek the other"s society, and if they met at lunch, it was never by preconceived arrangement.
Merefleet saw more of Mab when she was ash.o.r.e than Seton did. They would meet on the quay, in old Quiller"s cottage, or in the hotel-garden, several times a day. Occasionally he would accompany them on the water, but not often. He 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 nave audacity which once had made him shrink.
As for Mab, she was too eagerly interested in various matters to give more than a pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sist. 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 lives over there," she said. "I"m going to see him some day. I guess he"ll be glad, don"t you?"
"Who wouldn"t?" said Merefleet. "But that"s not the West, you know."
"No," she said simply. "He"s in the Land beyond the sea, Big Bear." And with a strange little smile into his face, she drew the shawl closer about the child in her arms and disappeared into Quiller"s cottage.
There was something in this interview that troubled Merefleet unaccountably. But when he saw her again, her mirth was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over, and he thought she had forgotten.
CHAPTER IX
It was about a week after this conversation that Merefleet, invited by Seton, joined his two friends at _table d"hote_ at their table. The suggestion came from Mab, he strongly suspected, for she seconded Seton"s proposal so vigorously that to decline would have been almost an impossibility.
"You look so lonely there," she said. "It"s miles nicer over here. What"s your opinion?"
"I agree with you, of course," said Merefleet, with a glance at Seton which discovered little.
"Isn"t he getting polite?" said the American girl approvingly. "Say, Bert! I guess you"ll have to take lessons in manners or he"ll get ahead of you."