“Mr. Hallam seems to be in a hurry,” she said.  “I wish he had not come now, because I do not like that man, and you have not been well lately.  You will not let him disturb you?”

Deringham rose and looked down on her with a curious little smile.  “I don’t know that it can be helped, but I am no more pleased to see Mr. Hallam than you seem to be,” he said.

For a moment, and though the breach between them had not been healed, the girl’s heart smote her.  Deringham had beguiled her into an action whose memory would, she fancied, always retain its sting, but he was her father, and seemed very worn and ill.  Also some instinctive impulse prompted her to detain him.

“Father,” she said pleadingly, “don’t see him.  Go in at once, and I will tell him that quietness is necessary to you.”

Deringham had almost yielded to the hand upon his arm when Hallam glanced in their direction and signed to him.  Then he shook off the girl’s grasp and she shivered a little for no apparent reason as they went in together.  There was nobody else about, for Mrs. Forel and her husband had gone down to the city, and she sat alone on the verandah while a murmur of voices reached her through an open window.  Though his words were inaudible her father appeared to be expostulating.  Then he came out, and as she noticed there was an unusual pallor in his face and that his hands were trembling, she remembered he had looked as he did then once before when a partial failure of the heart’s action had almost cost him his life.

“You must send Mr. Hallam away at once,” she said.

Deringham made a gesture of impatience.  “I shall be rid of him altogether in a few more minutes.  You have some money by you?”

“Yes,” said the girl.  “I am not fond of going to the bank, and got Mr. Forel to change my English cheque into currency, but why do you want it?”

“Hallam has to catch the steamer, and the banks are shut.  Don’t ask questions now, but get me the money quick.”

Alice Deringham went in, and returned with a little satchel.  “This is all I have, and I don’t feel very willing to lend it Mr. Hallam,” she said.

Deringham took the satchel from her and moved away; then, as though acting under impulse, he stopped and looked back at her.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, with a curious gentleness.  “It has relieved me of a good deal of anxiety.”

He went away, and Alice Deringham, hearing the door close behind him, wondered a little.  When she next looked up she saw Hallam swinging with hasty strides down the road, and a little later the roar of a whistle rang about the pines as a big white steamer moved out into the inlet.  A cloud of yellow vapour rolled from her funnel, there was a frothing wash beneath her towering sides, and the girl watched her languidly until the pines which shroud the Narrows shut the great white fabric from her sight and left only a moving trail of smoke.