“Where does he come from, this strange man?” the Princess asked.  “It is all the time in my mind that I have met him somewhere.  I am sure that he is one of us.”

“I believe that he lives in London,” Andrew answered, “and his name is Berners, Mr. Richard Berners.”

“I do not seem to remember the name,” the Princess remarked, “but the man’s face worries me.  What a delightful looking tea-tray!  Mr. Andrew, you must really sit down with us.  We ought to apologize for taking you by storm like this, and I have not thanked you yet for being so kind to my daughter.”  Andrew stepped back toward the cottage with a firm refusal upon his lips, but Jeanne’s hand suddenly rested upon the arm of his coarse blue jersey.

“If you please, Mr. Andrew,” she begged, “I want you to sit by me and tell me how you came to live in so strange a place.  Do you really not mind the solitude?”

Andrew looked down at her for a moment without answering.  For the first time, perhaps, he realized the charm of her pale expressive face with its rapid changes, and the soft insistent fire of her beautiful eyes.  He hesitated for a moment and then remained where he was, leaning against the flag-staff.

“It is very good of you, miss,” he said.  “As to why I came to live here, I do so simply because the house belongs to me.  It was my father’s and his father’s.  We folk who live in the country make few changes.”

She looked at him curiously.  The men whom she had known, even those of the class to whom he might be supposed to belong, were all in a way different.  This man talked only when he was obliged.  All the time she felt in him the attraction of the unknown.  He answered her questions and remarks in words, the rest remained unspoken.  She looked at him contemplatively as he stood by her side with a tea-cup in his hand, leaning still a little against the flag-staff.  Notwithstanding his rough clothes and heavy fisherman’s boots, there was nothing about his attitude or his speech, save in its dialect, to denote the fact that he was of a different order from that in which she had been brought up.  She felt an immense curiosity concerning him, and she felt, too, that it would probably never be gratified.  Most men were her slaves from the moment she smiled upon them.  This one she fancied seemed a little bored by her presence.  He did not even seem to be thinking about her.  He was watching steadily and with somewhat bent eyebrows Cecil de la Borne and Forrest.  Something struck her as she looked from one to the other.

“I read once,” she remarked, “that people who live in a very small village for generation after generation grow to look like one another.  In a certain way I cannot conceive two men more unlike, and yet at that moment there was something in your face which reminded me of Mr. De la Borne.”

He looked down at her with a quick frown.  Decidedly he was annoyed.

“You are certainly the first,” he said drily, “who has ever discovered the likeness, if there is any.”