However, his attention was diverted by coming round the corner to where there was a view of Anscombe Bay, when he immediately began to fight his battles o’er again, and show where they had been groping in the mud and seaweed in pursuit of sea-urchins, and stranded star-fish, and crabs.

“And it wasn’t a forest after all, it was just a sell-—nothing but mud and weed, only Fergus would go and poke in it, and there were horrid great rough stones and rocks too, and I tumbled over one.”

Anna here became conscious that the whole place was the resort of the afternoon promenaders of Rockquay, great and small, of all ranks and degrees, belonging to the “middle class” or below it, and that they might themselves become the object of attention; and she begged her brother to turn back and wait till they could have the place to themselves.

“These are a disgusting lot of cads,” he agreed, “but there won’t be such a jolly tide another time.  I declare I see the very rock where I saw the sea-mouse-—out there! red and shiny at the top.”

Here a well-dressed man, who had just come up the Coast-guard path, put aside his pipe, and taking off his hat, deferentially asked—-

“Have I the honour of addressing Sir Adrian Vanderkist?”

Adrian replied with a gracious nod and gesture towards his straw hat, and in another moment Anna found him answering questions, and giving his own account of the adventure to the inquirer, who, she had little doubt, was a reporter, and carrying his head, if possible, higher in consequence as he told how Fergus Merrifield had lingered over his stones, and all the rest after his own version.  She did not hear the whole, having had to answer the inquiries of one of the bicycle friends of the previous day, but when her attention was free she heard—-

“And the young lady, Sir Adrian?”

“Young lady!  Thank goodness, we were not bothered with any of that sort.”

“Indeed, Sir Adrian, I understood that there was a young lady, Miss Aurelia, that Master Merrifield was lamenting, as if she had met with a watery grave.”

“Ha! ha!  Aralia was only the name of a bit of fossil kind of a stick that Merrifield had us down there to find in the fossil forest.  I’m sure I saw no forest, only bits of mud and stuff!  But he found a bit, sure enough, and was ready to break his heart when he had to leave his bag behind him on the rock.  Aralia a young lady!  That’s a good one.”

He forgathered with a school-fellow on the way home, and Anna heard little more.

The next day, however, there arrived the daily local paper, addressed to Sir Adrian Vanderkist, Bart., and it was opened by him at breakfast-time.

“I say!  Look here!  ’Dangerous Accident in Anscombe.  A Youthful Baronet in peril!’ What asses people are!” he added, with an odd access of the gratified shame of seeing himself for the first time in print.  But he did not proceed to read aloud; there evidently was something he did not like, and he was very near pocketing it and rushing off headlong to school with it, if his aunt and Anna had not entreated or commanded for it, when he threw it over with an uncomplimentary epithet.