That Isabella Gell was a dunce! It was nonsense to say that the Manx country girls out of the thatched cottages expected Victor to marry them. Of course they didn't, and neither did they want his name or his position. What they really wanted was Victor himself, to flirt with and flatter them and make love to them, perhaps. But good gracious, what a shocking thing! That should never happen--never while she was about! Of course this meant that she must go back to save Victor. Naturally she could not expect to do so over a blind distance of three hundred miles, while those Manx country girls in their new Whitsuntide hats were shooting glances at him every Sunday in Church, or perhaps hanging about for him on week-evenings, in their wicked sun-bonnets, and even putting up their chins to be kissed in those shady lanes at the back of Ballamoar, when the sun would be softening, and the wood-pigeons would be cooing, and things would be coming together for the night. That settled matters! Her womanhood was awake by this time. Seven years of self-sacrifice had not been sufficient to quell it. After a certain struggle, and perhaps a certain shame, she put in her resignation. Her Committee did not express as much surprise as she had expected. The ladies hoped her native island would provide a little world, a little microcosm, in which she could still carry on her work for women, (she had given that as one of her excuses), and the gentlemen had no doubt her father, "and others," would receive her back "with open arms." She was to leave the Settlement at the close of the half year, that is to say at the end of July, but she decided to say nothing, either to her father or to Miss Green, about her return to the island until the time came for it at the beginning of August. She was thinking of Victor again, and cherishing a secret hope of taking him unawares somewhere--of giving him another surprise, such as she gave him that day in the glen, when he came down bareheaded, with the sea wind in his dark hair, and then stopped suddenly at the sight of her, with that entrancing look of surprise and wonder. And if any of those Manx country girls were about him when that happened .... Well, they would disappear like a shot. Of course they would! II Meantime, another woman was hearing black stories about Victor, and that was Janet. She believed them, she disbelieved them, she dreaded them as possibilities and resented them as slanders. But finally she concluded that, whether they were true or false, she must tell Victor all about them. Yet how was she to do so? How put a name to the evil things that were being said of him--she who had been the same as a mother to him all the way up since he was a child, and held him in her arms for his christening?