Then this brave girl, who had never faltered where action was necessary, began to sob and cry.

He took her hand and covered it with kisses.  “I may kiss this,” said he, plaintively, “may I not?”

She did not withdraw her fingers, but neither did she cease from weeping.  Her grief seemed to be something more than that resulting from the tension of strong feelings suddenly relaxed.

“Let me go home, let me go home!” was her sole reply to all his entreaties that she should rest a while, and strive to calm herself.  It was with difficulty that he could support her down the steep, so violently did she tremble.  When they reached the foot of it she turned to Richard and murmured:  “I have one favor to ask of you, Sir.  Will you grant it to me?”

“Most certainly, dear girl.  It would be gross ingratitude indeed if I did not.”

“Then never speak,” returned she, earnestly, “of what has occurred to-day.  Never show by your manner that you feel—­as you say—­grateful for what service I have been able to be to you.  Let not father nor Solomon ever know.”

“It will be very hard, Harry, to keep silence—­to owe you so great a debt, without acknowledging it,” said Richard, tenderly; “but, since such is your wish, I will obey it.”

“Thank you, Sir.  And now I will go home alone.  I was deterred by the wind, the steepness—­any thing you please—­from accompanying you up yonder; remember that.  You will not mind waiting a while behind me?”

“Surely not,” said Richard, wonderingly.

And the next moment she had hurried round an angle of the main-land cliff, and was gone.

CHAPTER XIII.

FISHING FOR AN INVITATION.

“What a strange girl!” muttered Richard, as he stood in the same hollowed rock, alone, where Harry and he had first taken shelter.  “What a compound of strength and weakness—­as my mother says all girls are, though I have never known them strong before!  How eager she seemed to part company with me, and how anxious to get home without me—­and I am never to speak of what has happened, to her father nor to Solomon!  This Solomon is her unwelcome wooer, that is clear.  He is neither young nor handsome—­nor attractive in any way in her eyes, I reckon.  And what a beauty she is, to be thrown away on such a boor!”

The recollection that the door at the top of the rock had been left open, and the key inside it, here flashed upon him.  “She will be sorry about that key,” he thought; “and glad and grateful to me if I go back and fetch it.  The old man will be wroth with her for having trusted a stranger with such a treasure.  This Trevethick must be an ingenious fellow, and a long-sighted one, no doubt.  It was he who applied to Parson Whymper for a lease of the old mine, if I remember right.  Perhaps the chaplain may help me to get it him, for I owe him something for his daughter’s sake.  The idea of his having such a daughter!  What rubbish is this we artists talk of birth and beauty!  Neither in life nor on canvas have I ever seen one so fair as this girl.”  He meditated for a moment, then cried out, angrily:  “Heaven curse me, if I harm her!  What an ungrateful villain should I be!  If there be a Gehenna, and but one man in it, I should deserve to be that man!”