‘And what, may I ask, do you mean by our misadventure?’ There was a ring of sharpness in Linda Thorne’s tone. ‘Ah--what! The moment,’ said Gaston, ‘when gleams of a scarlet cloak first flashed upon one along the sand-dunes seems, to my own consciousness, about the most serious of them.’ ‘You are singularly insincere, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot!’ ‘I cannot agree with you, Mrs. Thorne. My worst enemies, on the contrary, have the grace to credit me with a sort of brutal frankness.’ ‘And, supposing no scarlet cloak had appeared? You would willingly have been left, a second Robinson Crusoe, on the desert shores of Luc?’ ‘The cases are not parallel. Robinson Crusoe had only the society of his man Friday.’ ‘And there were no beaux yeux to weep for him! So many years,’ observed Linda, ‘stand between me and the literature of my childhood that I am uncertain about details. But I don’t think one ever heard of a Mrs. Crusoe!’ Gaston knew that he was being laughed at. He kept his temper charmingly. ‘And there is, very decidedly, a Mrs. Arbuthnot. When I think of Dinah, I cannot call Miss Tighe’s advent a misadventure. Poor Dinah has a child’s quick capacity for unhappiness. Her imagination would have conjured up a dozen possible horrors, by sea and land, if I had not returned to her.’ ‘That is all so very, very pretty, is it not?’ Linda stooped, as if watching the rush of the sea; Gaston Arbuthnot could not catch the expression of her face. ‘We professional old travellers are toughened and sun-baked out of all rose-water nervousness. Robbie has told you--whom does he not tell?--the story of my being lost, actually lost, in the Nilgiris? If I were to be mislaid for a fortnight, I really don’t believe the Doctor would suffer a moment’s uneasiness.’ ‘And yet you were so cruelly upset by _his_ disappearance. The superiority,’ apostrophised Gaston, ‘of the unselfish sex over ours.’ ‘I was not only upset by his disappearance,’ said Linda, still taking an interest in the waves, ‘I am disturbed about him, in my conscience, still. If Doctor Thorne takes the slightest chill to-night, we shall be having the old jungle fever back upon him.’ Gaston sympathised as to this contingency, not, as yet, perceiving the drift of Linda’s alarms. ‘At Robbie’s age one cannot be too prudent. To run into one of these cold Channel fogs might end in something quite too serious. And, although the stars make a pretence at shining,’ Linda raised her head with tentative playfulness, ‘the enemy is at hand. I feel fog in the air.’ ‘The air is clearer than it has been all day. In another three or four hours the sun will have risen. We shall be in Guernsey----’