"That don't excuse your having went there. In two or three minutes more you'd have reached your home here--and we might ha' kept it all quiet. As it is, every tongue in the place is a wagging over it." "Let 'em wag," suggested Walter. "They can't know nothing." "How do you know what they'll find out, with their prying and their marvelling?" demanded the angry man. "Let 'em wag, indeed!" "I could hardly get to the Nunnery," pleaded Walter. "I thought I was dying." "There'll be a rare fuss about it with the Castlemaines! I know that. Every knock that has come to the door this blessed day I've took to be the Master o' Greylands and shook in my shoes. A fine market you'll bring your pigs to, if you be to go on like this, a getting yourself and everybody else into trouble! George Hallet, poor fellow, would never have been such a fool." Reproached on all sides, self-convicted of worse folly than his father had a notion of, weak in body, fainting in spirit, and at his very wits' end to ward off the home questions, Walter ended by bursting into a flood of tears. That disarmed Tom Dance; and he let the matter drop. Sarah limped in with the arrowroot, and close upon that Mr. Parker arrived. The bright moon, wanting yet some days to its full, shone down on the chapel ruins. Seated against the high, blank wall of the Grey Nunnery, his sketch-book before him, his pencil in hand, was Mr. North. He had come there to take the Friar's Keep by moonlight: at least, the side portion of it that looked that way. The chapel ruins with its broken walls made the foreground: the half-ruined Keep, with its Gothic door of entrance, the back; to the right the sketch took in a bit of the sea. No doubt it would make an attractive picture when done in watercolours, and one that must bear its own painful interest for George North. He worked attentively and rapidly, his thoughts meanwhile as busy as his hands. The moon gave him almost as much light as he would have had by day: though it cast dark shades as well as brightness; and that would make the chief beauty of the completed painting. Somewhere about a week had passed since the accident to Walter Dance, and the young man was three parts well again.