Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to assume, the unattractive figure of “red-hot” Barstow, and the obvious swindle which was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that which Skinner expected.  Chayne, instead of turning his back upon so distasteful a company, frequented it in the resolve to take Sylvia out of its grasp.  It did not need a lover to see that she slept little of nights and passed distressful days.  She had fled from her mother’s friends at Chamonix, only to find herself helpless amongst a worse gang in her father’s house.  Very well.  She must be released.  He had proposed to take her away then and there.  She had refused.  Well, he had been blunt.  He would go about the business in the future in a more delicate way.  And so he came again and again to the little house under the hill where the stream babbled through the garden, and every day the apples grew redder upon the boughs.

But it was disheartening work.  His position indeed became difficult, and it needed all his tenacity to enable him to endure it.  The difficulty became very evident one afternoon early in August, and the afternoon was, moveover, remarkable in that Garratt Skinner was betrayed into a revelation of himself which was to bear consequences of gravity in a future which he could not foresee.  Chayne rode over upon that afternoon, and found Garratt Skinner alone and, according to his habit, stretched at full-length in his hammock with a cigar between his lips.  He received Captain Chayne with the utmost geniality.  He had long since laid aside his ineffectual vulgarity of manner.

“You must put up with me, Captain Chayne,” he said.  “My daughter is out.  However, she—­I ought more properly to say, they—­will be back no doubt before long.”

“They being—­”

“Sylvia and Walter Hine.”

Chayne nodded his head.  He had known very well who “they” must be, but he had not been able to refrain from the question.  Jealousy had hold of him.  He knew nothing of Sylvia’s determination to acquire a power greater than her father’s over the vain and defenceless youth.  The words with which she had hinted her plan to him had been too obscure to convey their meaning.  He was simply aware that Sylvia more and more avoided him, more and more sought the companionship of Walter Hine; and such experience as he had, taught him that women were as apt to be blind in their judgment of men as men in their estimation of women.

He sought now to enlist Garratt Skinner on his side, and drawing a chair nearer to the hammock he sat down.

“Mr. Skinner,” he said, speaking upon an impulse, “you have no doubt in your mind, I suppose, as to why I come here so often.”

Garratt Skinner smiled.

“I make a guess, I admit.”

“I should be very glad if your daughter would marry me,” Chayne continued, “and I want you to give me your help.  I am not a poor man, Mr. Skinner, and I should certainly be willing to recognize that in taking her away from you I laid myself under considerable obligations.”