“That so, gentlemens.  Drink branty all the time, both of them.  But little one—­everybody smile at him.  Pretty boy.  Swim and dive, something lovely.  One evening both get drunk and walk along the edge of cliff up there.  Then little one, he say:  I good diver, eh, what, friend?  Big one say:  You dive prettier than dolphin.—­What bet, over cliff here, now?—­Six bottle branty.—­Done!  Clothes off, over he go, like a sea-bird.  All finished.  That so, gentlemens.  Next morning they bring clothes to big one into house.  Big one, when he wake up and see clothes lying there, with no friend inside, he very angry with servants and everybody else, and drink no more branty for three days.  Dam-fool foreigners.”

“That’s a tragedy, anyhow,” said the bishop.

“You are right.  It is quite artistic—­that touch about bringing back the clothes, the empty shell, next morning.  Quite artistic.”

Mr. Heard looked up at the crag.  It made him dizzy to picture some human body hurtling through the air from that awful height.  Its surface was of perfect smoothness.  But what struck him even more was the uncommon and almost menacing coloration.  The rock was bluish black, spattered with maculations of a ruddy sanguine tint, as though drops of blood had oozed out, in places, from its stony heart.

“I remember Mrs. Meadows telling me that story,” he said to Keith.  “Isn’t her villa at the back?”

“The very place.  By the way, when next you call, would you please say something particularly nice de Ma part?  I don’t see half enough of that lady, considering how much I like her.  How is she?”

“Complains of headache.”

“Headache?  That is very unlike Mrs. Meadows.  I always look upon her as a bundle of steel springs.  Perhaps something is wrong with the baby.”

“Maybe,” replied the bishop.  “She seems to dote on it.”

Then that last visit to his cousin suddenly recurred to him; he remembered her conversation—­he thought of the lonely woman up thee.  Strange!  Somehow or other, she had been at the back of his mind all the time.  He decided to call again in a day or two.

Keith said: 

“I should not like to come between her and the child.  That woman is a tiger—­mother. . . .  Heard, there has been something in your mind all day long.  What is it?”

“I believe there has.  I’ll try to explain.  You know those Japanese flowers—­” he began, and then broke off.

“I am glad you are becoming terrestrial at last.  Nothing like Mother Earth!  You cannot think how much money I wasted on Japanese plants, especially bulbs, before I convinced myself that they cannot be grown on this soil.”

“Those paper flowers, I mean, which we used to put in our finger-bowls at country dinner tables.  They look like shrivelled specks of cardboard.  But in the water they begin to grow larger and to unfold themselves into unexpected patterns of flowers of all colours.  That is how I feel—­expanding, and taking on other tints.  New problems, new influences, are at work upon me.  It is as if I needed altogether fresh standards.  Sometimes I feel almost ashamed—­”