It was well perhaps that Berwick could not see just then into her heart, and yet it was still an ignorant and innocent heart. The youngest girl present at the Halnakeham Castle ball could probably have taught Mrs. Rebell more than she now knew of the ways of men--almost, it might be said, of the ways of love. Her father had had the manhood crushed out of him by his great misfortune. Barbara, as child and girl, had reverenced--not the chill automaton, caring only for the English papers and a little mild play, which Richard Rebell had become in middle life,--but the attractive early image of him sedulously presented to her by her mother. She had had no brothers to bring young people to the many homes of her girlhood. Then, across her horizon, had come the baleful figure of Pedro Rebell, but at no time, after her marriage, had she made the mistake of regarding him as a normal man. No, her first real knowledge of the average Englishman had been during those weeks of convalescence, spent at the Government House of Santa Maria, when she had been slowly struggling back into a wish to live. There she had known, and had shrunk from the knowledge, that all those about her were aware of what sort of life she had been compelled to lead on her husband's plantation. Every step of Mr. Johnstone's negotiations with Pedro Rebell was followed by her new friends with intense sympathy, and when at last the planter had been half persuaded, half bribed into signing a document binding him not to molest his wife, her only longing had been to go away, and never to see any of the people connected with the island again. What could Barbara Rebell know of men--of such men as James Berwick and Oliver Boringdon? She dowered them with virtues and qualities, with unselfish impulses and powers of self-restraint, which would have brought a Galahad to shame. She knew enough of a certain side of life to recognise and shrink from such coarseness as was not the saving grace of Mrs. Turke. She realised that that type of mind must see evil in even the most innocent tie between a man and a woman, but on such minds she preferred not to dwell. She knew how close had been the affection between her mother and Madame Sampiero. Why should not some such feeling, close and yet sexless, link her to James Berwick, to whom she had experienced,--so much she had perforce to acknowledge to herself,--a curious, intimate attraction from the first time they had met? So it was that to-night she looked at him with concern, and spoke with a new note of anxiety in her voice, "I should have been quite content to go back with the Boringdons--I fear you stayed on for my sake." "But I should not have been at all content if you had gone back with the Boringdons! Why should I not stay on for your sake?" he was smiling at her. She looked at him rather puzzled. When they were alone, they two, with no third influence between them, Barbara always felt completely happy and at ease. His presence brought security.