“There is Major Mallett standing at the landing, and there is the gig.  I think that she is the prettiest boat here.”

The mainsail was hoisted by the time they reached the side of the yacht, and the anchor hove short, so that in two or three minutes they were under way.

“She looks very nice,” Lady Greendale said.  “I thought that she would look much worse.”

“You should have seen her yesterday, mamma, when we passed her, with the jagged stumps of the topmast and bowsprit and all her ropes in disorder, the sails hanging down in the water and the wreckage alongside.  I could have cried when I saw her.  At any rate, she looks very neat and trim now.

“Where is the Phantom, Major Mallett?”

“She got under way at eleven o’clock, and has gone up to Southampton,” he replied, quietly, but with a half-interrogatory glance towards her.

She gave a little nod, and took a chair a short distance from that in which Lady Greendale had seated herself.

“Has he gone for good?” Frank asked, as he sat down beside her.

“Of course he has,” she said.  “You don’t suppose, after what I told you last night, that I was going to accept him.”

“I hoped not,” he said, gravely.  “You cannot tell what a relief it has been to me.  Of course, dear, you will understand that so long as you were to marry a man who would be likely to make you happy I was content, but I could not bear to think of your marrying a man I knew to be altogether unworthy of you.”

“You know very well,” she said, “that you never intended to let me marry him.  As I said to you last night, I feel very much aggrieved, Major Mallett.  You had said you would be my friend, and yet you let this go on when you could have stopped it at once.  You let me get talked about with that man, and you would have gone on letting me get still more talked about before you interfered.  That was not kind or friendly of you.”

“But, Bertha,” he remonstrated, “the fact that we had not been friends, and that he had beaten me in a variety of matters, was no reason in the world why I should interfere, still less why you should not marry him.  When I was stupid enough to tell you that story, years ago, I stated that I had no grounds for saying that it was he who played that trick upon my boat, and it would have been most unfair on my part to have brought that story up again.”

“Quite so, but there was the other story.”

“What other story?” Frank asked in great surprise.

“The story that George Lechmere came and told me two days ago,” she said, gravely.

“George Lechmere!  You don’t mean to say—­”

“I do mean to say so.  He behaved like a real friend, and came to tell me the story of Martha Bennett.

“He told me,” she went on, as he was about to speak, “that you had made up your mind to tell mamma about it, directly you heard that I was engaged to Mr. Carthew.  That would have been something, but would hardly have been fair to me.  If I had once been engaged to him, it would have been very hard to break it off, and naturally it would have been much greater pain to me then than it has been now.”