The girl whom he had addressed as “ma mignonne” was emphatically of the “mignonne” type. She had pushed back the hood of her cloak from her golden-brown hair, and the outline of her small head showed like a chiselled cameo against the dark background of rock. Seen in profile, her face recalled the picture of one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s child-angels. It was delicate in colouring, with large, wondering dark eyes and a cupid’s bow mouth that seemed expressly called into being to wear the smiles and languors of a spoilt society beauty. It was a face, too, that paired well with the one at this moment upturned to meet her downcast gaze. There were people who were wont to call Val Thorndyke an Apollo Belvedere and who compared his features to those of a Greek marble; and there were others who vowed that they could see no beauty in beetle-brows and a low forehead, and who hinted at a disagreeable resemblance to a certain well-known picture of Mephistopheles. Possibly the truth lay somewhere between the two verdicts. The beetle-brows were there, and the Greek outline was there, and the combination made a face, dark, clean-cut, impassive—the face that knows how to wear the society mask with so much ease, and that, as a rule, has, as a fit corollary, an unvibrating, passionless voice that would drawl out hottest love or deadliest hate in much the same tone as it would pronounce an opinion on a brand of chablis or fix the stakes of a game at baccarat.
While he had been speaking the girl’s eyes had wandered away to the distant horizon. To his fancy a sudden mist seemed to veil them, and there was a sound as of tears in her voice as she clasped her hands together and cried impetuously:
“Oh, Val! Val! it is hopeless! We must give it up! I must marry the castle and the diamonds and the settlements and old Euan, and you must lay yourself out to catch some heiress and get your debts paid, and—”
“Hush!” interrupted Val sternly. “There shall be no talk of heiresses for me! The day that makes you that old idiot’s wife will see me take my fate into my own hands, and—”
“Oh, Val, it is wicked, horribly wicked, to talk like that!”
“Wicked!” echoed Val. “Oh, my love, my love!” and for a moment there came a vibrating note in his voice. “Who thinks of what is wicked or what is good in your presence! You, and such as you, are the law of right and wrong to us men. We keep or we break it according as we love you little or much.”
The girl’s face flushed, her head bent lower; for a few moments she did not speak.
“Sometimes I feel I am dreadfully, dreadfully wicked,” she presently said, in a low, uncertain tone. “Sometimes I feel I am webbed in—caught in a sort of network of untruth and do what I will, I can’t get out of it. Lady Clancy, Euan’s sister, you know, has been whispering little stories about you and me, and yesterday Euan came to me and asked me if there were any truth in them. He asked me first if I could tell him why your friend’s Archie, Milner’s, yacht had been so long lying off Mull, looking very hard at me all the time. Then he took my hands in his and said, ‘Don’t be afraid, child; look up in my face and tell me the whole truth, whatever it is.’ And, of course, I looked up in his face—so—and said I knew nothing about your yacht, and that you and I never met except in his presence, and—”
“Fay,” interrupted the young man, in a slow, soft drawl, “are you trying to make me add murder to my other sins? Do you want to send me forcing my way into that den of a place over there to put a bullet through the thick skull of that old idiot?”
As he said the words “den of a place over there,” his eyes wandered to where at his right hand, the gaunt cliffs sloped gradually into a succession of green plateaux jutting out to sea. Above the woods of fir and beech that crowned one of these plateaux, a turreted castle, the ancestral home of the laird of Glen Orchol, towered grim and dark against the translucent sky, so grim and dark, indeed, that it seemed as if it were cut out in black bas-relief, upon a plane of agate.
Fay’s eyes instinctively followed the direction of Val’s.
“It does look like a great, dark, frowning Bastille, doesn’t it?” she said, with a little childish pout on her pretty lips. “I never look at it but what it sets me shuddering. Can’t we go and sit somewhere else, where the cliffs will shut it out from our sight?”
“Come and sit in the boat,” said Val. “You’ll find it pleasanter than this wet boulder. Ah, how the tide has ebbed. Not that way; you’ll get your feet wet. Stay, let me carry you?”
But Fay managed to clear the pools, jumping lightly from one slippery rock to another, and seated herself in the boat with scarcely a touch to his hand.
“Oh, kind rocks!” she murmured, glancing upwards, with a sigh of relief, to where the big, overhanging crags effectually shut out Glen Orchol Castle from view.
Val seated himself, facing her in the boat, and, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, let his eyes feast themselves on the daintily beautiful face before him.
Fay seemed all unconscious of his gaze. Her eyes, with a faraway look in them, were once more fixed on the distant horizon, and for the moment
