To their reprehensible tendencies in this last respect the Miss Minetts could bear painful witness, as—­with hushed voices and entreaties the sorry tale might “go no further”—­they more than once confided to Theresa Bilson.  For one Saturday afternoon—­unknown to the vicar—­being zealous in the admonishing of recalcitrant church-goers and rounding up of possible Sunday-school recruits, they crossed to the island at low tide; and in their best district visitor manner—­too often a sparkling blend of condescension and familiarity, warranted to irritate—­severally demanded entrance to the first two of the black cottages.—­The Inn they avoided.  Refined gentlewomen can hardly be expected, even in the interests of religion, to risk pollution by visiting a common tavern, more particularly when a company of half-grown lads and blue jerseyed men—­who may, of course, have been carousing within—­hangs about its morally malodorous door.

Of precisely what followed their attempted violation of the privacy of those two cottages, even the Miss Minetts themselves could subsequently give no very coherent account.  They only knew that some half-hour later, with petticoats raised to a height gravely imperilling decency, they splashed landward across the causeway—­now ankle-deep in water—­while the lads congregated before the Inn laughed boisterously, the men turned away with a guffaw, dogs of disgracefully mixed parentage yelped, and the elder female members of the Proud and Sclanders families flung phrases lamentably subversive of gentility after their retreating figures from the foreshore.

Modesty and mortification alike forbade the outraged ladies reporting the episode to Dr. Horniblow in extenso.  But they succeeded in giving Miss Bilson a sufficiently lurid account of it to make “the darling little island,” in as far as her charge, Damaris, was concerned, more than ever taboo.  Their request that the story might “go no further” she interpreted with the elasticity usually accorded to such requests; and proceeded, at the first opportunity, to retail the whole shocking occurrence to her pupil as an example of the ingratitude and insubordination of the common people.  For Theresa was nothing if not conservative and aristocratic.  From such august anachronisms as the divine right of kings and the Stuart succession, down to humble bobbing of curtseys and pulling of forelocks in to-day’s village street, she held a permanent brief for the classes as against the masses.  Unluckily the Miss Minetts’ hasty and watery withdrawal, with upgathered skirts, across the causeway had appealed to Damaris’ sense of comedy rather than of tragedy.—­She didn’t want to be unkind, but you shouldn’t interfere; and if you insisted on interfering you must accept whatever followed.  The two ladies in question were richly addicted to interfering she had reason to think.—­And then they must have looked so wonderfully funny scuttling thus!

The picture remained by her as a thing of permanent mirth.  So it was hardly surprising, in face of the dominant direction of her thoughts to-night, that, when the Miss Minetts’ name punctuated Theresa’s discourse recurrent as a cuckoo-cry, remembrance of their merrily inglorious retirement from the region of Faircloth’s Inn should present itself.  Whereupon Damaris’ serious mood was lightened as by sudden sunshine, and she laughed.