He placed the white mackintosh around her slim figure.  “Take my advice,” he said in his brief fashion, “and don’t come bathing alone in this direction again!”

She made a small shy gesture of invitation.  “Sit down a minute!” she said half-pleadingly.  “I know you are very wet; but the sun is so warm, and they say sea-water never chills.”

He hesitated momentarily; then, possibly because she had spoken with so childlike an appeal, he sat down in the shingle beside her.

She stretched out a slender hand to him, almost as though feeling her way.  And when he took it she made a slight movement towards him, as of one about to make a confidence.  “Now we can talk,” she said.

He let her hand go again, and felt in the pocket of his coat, which he carried on his arm, for his pipe.

She drew a little nearer to him.  “Mr. Courteney,” she said, “doesn’t ‘Thank you’ sound a silly thing to say?”

He drew back.  “Don’t!  Please don’t!” he said, and flushed uneasily as he opened his tobacco-pouch.  “I would infinitely rather you said nothing at all to any one.  Don’t do it again, that’s all.”

“Mustn’t I even tell Rosa Mundi?” she said.

His flush deepened as he remembered that she would probably know him by name.  She must have known in those far-off Australian days that he was working with all his might to free young Baron from her toils.

He sat in silence till, “Will you tell me something?” whispered Rosemary, leaning nearer.

He stiffened involuntarily.  “I don’t know.”

“Please try!” she urged softly.  “I feel sure you can.  Why—­why don’t you like Rosa Mundi?”

He looked at her, and his eyes were steely; but they softened by imperceptible degrees as they met the earnest sweetness of her answering look.  “No, I can’t tell you that,” he said with decision.

But her look held him.  “Is it because you don’t think she is very good?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said again.

Still she looked at him, and again there seemed to be in her eyes that expression of a child who has seen life without understanding it.  “Perhaps you think I am too young to know good from evil,” she said after a moment.  “I am not.  I have told you I am older than I look, and in some things I am older even than my years.  Then, too, I belong to Rosa Mundi.  I told you, didn’t I?  I am her familiar spirit.  She has even called me her angel, or her better self.  I know a great many things about her, and some of them are very sad.  May I tell you some of the things I know?”

He turned his eyes away from her abruptly, with the feeling that he was resisting some curious magnetism.  What was there about this child that attracted him?  He was not a lover of children.  Moreover, she was verging upon womanhood approaching what he grimly termed “the dangerous age.”

He filled his pipe deliberately while she waited for his answer, turning his gaze upon the dazzling line of the horizon.