He had started early, fearing that there might be a meet that day; and he had acted wisely, for in the hall there were one or two men lounging by the fire in scarlet, and Pamela was wearing her riding-habit when she received him. He was shown into a little room which opened on to the garden behind the house, and thither Pamela came. "You are alone!" she said. "Yes; Stretton would not come." "None the less, I am very grateful." She smiled as she spoke, and sat down, with her eyes upon him, waiting for his story. The disappointment was visible upon his face, but not upon hers. Pamela's indeed, was to him at this moment rather inscrutable. It was not indifferent, however. He recognised that, and was, in a way, consoled. It had been his fear that at the first word she would dismiss the subject, and turn her back on it for good. On the contrary, she was interested, attentive. "You found him, then?" she asked. "Yes. You would like to hear what passed?" "Of course." "Even though I failed?" She looked at him with some surprise at his insistence. "Yes, yes," she said, a little impatiently. "We were nearly three days longer in reaching the Blue Fleet than we anticipated," he began. "Stretton came on board the fish-cutter----" And Pamela interrupted him-- "Why were you nearly three days longer? Tell me about your own journey out to the fleet from the beginning." She was, in fact, as much interested in her messenger as in the errand upon which she had sent him. Warrisden began to see that his journey after all was not entirely a defeat. The alliance to which they had set their hands up there in the village on the hill was bearing its fruit. It had set them in a new relationship to each other, and in a closer intimacy. He told the story of his voyage, making light of his hardships on the steam-cutter. She, on the other hand, made much of them. "To quote your captain," she remarked, with a smile, "it was not a Bobby's job." Warrisden laughed, and told her of Stretton's arrival in the punt of the _Perseverance_. He described the way in which he had come on board; he related the conversation which had passed between them at the stern of the cutter. "He hadn't the look of a man who had failed," Warrisden continued. "He stood there on the swinging deck with his legs firmly planted apart, as easily as if he were standing on a stone pavement. I, on the other hand, was clinging desperately to a stay. He stood there, with the seas swinging up behind him, and stubbornly refused to come." "You told him of his father's illness?" asked Pamela. "He replied that his father had not sent for him." "You spoke of the candles lit every night?"