“No, I don’t suppose for a minute you do,” he murmured back, still holding her sleeve, and with his other hand on the latch. “You’re too near an angel for that. I tell you what: Suppose you just start in and do as much praying as you can, to kind o’ balance the thing. It’ll all be needed; for as far as I can see now, I’ve got some regular old whoppers to come yet.” Then the young man released the sleeve, snatched up the hand at the end of that sleeve, kissed it, and was gone before Kate could say another word. When she had thought it all over, through hours of seclusion in her room, she was still very much at sea as to what that word would have been had time been afforded her in which to utter it. CHAPTER XXIII--THE COUNCIL OF WAR. Having left the castle, Bernard walked briskly away across the open square, past the quay and along the curling stretch of sands which led to the path under the cliffs. He had taken the hammer from his pocket and swung it as he strode onward, whistling as he went. A mile or so along the strand, he turned off at a footway leading up the rocks, and climbed this nimbly to the top, gaining which, he began to scan closely the broad expanse of dun-colored bog-plain which dipped gradually toward Mount Gabriel. His search was not protracted. He had made out the figures he sought, and straightway set out over the bog, with a light, springing step, still timed to a whistled marching tune, toward them. “Well, I’ve treed the coon!” was his remark when he had joined Jerry and Linsky. “It was worth waiting for a week just to catch him like that, with his guard down. Wait a minute, then I can be sure of what I’m talking about.” The others had not invited this adjuration by any overt display of impatience, and they watched the young man now take an envelope from his pocket and work out a sum on its back with a pencil in placid if open-eyed contentment. They both studied him, in fact, much as their grandfathers might have gazed at the learned pig at a fair--as a being with resources and accomplishments quite beyond the laborious necessity of comprehension. He finished his ciphering, and gave them, in terse summary, the benefit of it.