After dinner Smithson and Montesma sat on deck, smoking their cigars, and lazily watching the lights on sea, and the lights on shore; these brilliant in the foreground, those dim in the distance.

’You can telegraph to your Rio Janeiro friend to-morrow morning, if you like,’ said Smithson, presently, ’and tell him to send a first-rate skipper and crew.  Lady Lesbia has made up her mind to see St. Malo Regatta, and with such a sacred charge I can’t be too careful.’

‘I’ll wire before eight o’clock to-morrow,’ answered Montesma, ’You have decided wisely.  Your respectable English Wilkinson is an excellent man—­but nothing would surprise me less than his reducing your Cayman to matchwood in the next gale.’

CHAPTER XL.

A NOTE OF ALARM.

That strange scene in the old house at Fellside made a profound impression upon Lord Hartfield.  He tried to disguise his trouble, and did all in his power to seem gay and at perfect ease in his wife’s company; but his mind was full of anxiety, and Mary loved him too well to be for a moment in doubt as to his feelings.

‘There is something wrong, Jack,’ she said, while they were breakfasting at a table in the verandah, with the lake and the bills in front of them and the sweet morning air around them.  ’You try to talk and to be lively, but there is a little perpendicular wrinkle in your forehead which I know as well as the letters of the alphabet, and that little line means worry.  I used to see it in the old days, when you were breaking your heart for Lesbia.  Why cannot you be frank and confide in me.  It is your duty, sir, as my husband.’

’Is it my duty to halve my burdens as well as my joys?  How do I know if those girlish shoulders are strong enough to bear the weight of them?’

’I can bear anything you can bear, and I won’t be cheated out of my share in your worries.  If you were obliged to have a tooth out, I would have one out too, for company.’

‘I hope the dentist would be too conscientious to allow that.’

‘Tell me your trouble, Hartfield,’ she said, earnestly, leaning across the table, bringing her grave intelligent face near to him.

They were quite alone, he and she.  The servants had done their ministering.  Behind them there was the empty dining-room, in front of them the sunlit panorama of lake and hill.  There could not be a safer place for telling secrets.

‘Tell me what it is that worries you,’ Mary pleaded again.

’I will, dear.  After all perfect trust is the best; nay, it is your due, for you are brave enough and true enough to be trusted with secrets that mean life and death.  In a word, then, Mary, the cause of my trouble is that old man we saw the other night.’

‘Steadman’s uncle?’

‘Do you really believe that he is Steadman’s uncle?’

‘My grandmother told me so,’ answered Mary, reddening to the roots of her hair.