"It's extraordinary," he said. "Do you know, Victor, she is the only woman I have ever met who has reminded me of your mother? And if I close my eyes when she is speaking, I can almost persuade myself it is the same." Stowell began to think he hated the very name of Fenella. But there were moments when he felt that he could have given the whole world, if he had possessed it, just to look upon her face. One day Gell came to "report progress" about Bessie. She was getting on all right, but "longing" a little in those unaccustomed surroundings, so he had to go down in the evenings sometimes to take her out for walks. "We'll have to be careful about that, though," he said, "for what do you think?" "What?" "Dan Baldromma suspects _me_, and is having me watched." Stowell was startled and ashamed. Where had his head been that he had not thought of this before? He had got up from his desk and was looking vacantly out of the window when he became aware that the Governor's big blue landau was drawing up in the street below. At the next moment there was a light step on the stairs, and at the next the door of his room was opened by his young clerk, and through the doorway came someone who was like a vision from a thousand of his dreams, but now grown in her stately height out of the beauty of a bewitching girl into the full bloom of womanly loveliness. It was Fenella Stanley. II "You wouldn't come to see me, so I've come to see you." Stowell never knew what answer he made when he took her outstretched hand; but after a moment he said, "You know my friend Gell?" "Indeed I do .... And how's Isabella? .... And Adelaide? .... And Verbena?" While Fenella was talking to Gell, Stowell had time to look at her. She was the most beautiful woman in the world! Those dark eyes, beaming with bluish opal; those lips like an opening rose; that spacious forehead, with its brown hair shot with gold--they had not told him the half. Gell made shift to answer for the sisters he had not seen for months, and then went off. And then Fenella, taking the chair that Stowell had set for her, and dropping her voice to a deeper note, said, "And now to business. You know we've established on the island a branch of the Women's Protection League?" "I know." "One of its objects is to protect women from the law." "The law?" "Yes, sir, the law," said Fenella smiling. "Your law can be very cruel sometimes--especially to women. But our first case is not one of that kind. It is a case in which the law, if rightly guided, can best do justice by showing mercy." A young wife in Castletown had killed her husband. She had already appeared at the High Bailiff's Court and been committed for trial to the Court of General Gaol Delivery--the Manx Court of Assize.