Having solemnly interred the three coins, the young people regretfully remembered the time, and turned away from the lovely spot to go back to Chagmouth. For the sake of variety they went by another path, which led over the top of the headland and down on to an inland road. In the deep sheltered green lane early violets were blooming, and presently, on the banks of a little pond, they spied the first kingcups of the year. They were growing in a rather swampy place, and it would have been prudent of the girls to have let Bevis gather them for them; instead of which they both insisted upon venturing on to some very spongy ground, with the result that Mavis made a false step and plunged suddenly, well over her knees, into water. She splashed out again immediately, but the damage was done. Here was a pretty business--Mavis, newly recovered from a bad attack of bronchitis, was wet through and shivering already. "Oh, she'll get cold!" cried Merle. "What _are_ we to do?" "I feel like a dr-r-r-owned r-r-r-at!" said Mavis through her chattering teeth. "Mrs. Jarvis lives close by. She'd dry her things," suggested Bevis. "Oh, do let us go there at once then!" Where Mavis's health was concerned, Merle, through sad experience, was an anxious little mother. The Triumvirate hurried off post-haste in the direction of a white-washed cottage whose chimney peeped above the hedge on the opposite side of the road. Mrs. Jarvis was a short, wizened, elderly widow woman, who had suffered badly in the battle of life and had come off with many scars. Fourteen years ago she had been the village nurse, and had been sent for on that tragic evening when poor Mrs. Hunter, helpless and speechless, lay gasping with fluttering breath on the sofa in the parlour of the King's Arms. It was Mrs. Jarvis who had performed the last offices, who had supplied what information she could to the doctor and the coroner, and had indeed been one of the principal witnesses at the inquest. It is said that misfortunes never come singly, and on the day when all Chagmouth had flocked to the churchyard to watch the stranger's funeral, Mrs. Jarvis had been overwhelmed with a trouble of her own. Her one child, a wilful headstrong lad of thirteen, had run away, and had taken with him the few savings that she had kept stored inside an old tea-pot in the cupboard. All search for him had been in vain, and it was generally supposed in the neighbourhood that he had walked to Port Sennen and gone to sea as a cabin boy in one of the many vessels that lay in the busy harbour. Certainly from that day to this his mother had had no further news of him. This grief had been the bitter culmination of many black years, and it had preyed on the poor woman's mind to such an extent that she was often strange in her manner, and indeed for a time had been an inmate of the County Asylum. She was perfectly harmless, and though she could no longer be trusted as a nurse, she