"Don't be alarmed, sir. I shall keep rigorously within the limits of the mapped-out estate." "Of course you will, my dear sir. I have no fear. It is fascinating work, that mining, though. If I were a young man I might be tempted to begin myself. As you saw indoors, I do dabble a bit in mineralogy and metallurgy. Dinah, too, is quite an expert." "Indeed! I was noticing your collection of ores. Some of them very rich." "Yes; bits I have chipped here and there during the long years of my stay. There we are. Your estate runs--" A shrill whistle arrested him as he stood on the top of a rugged mass of stone, high above the cottage, where luxuriant ferns clustered in every niche; and placing a little silver call which hung by his watch-chain to his lips, he blew an answer. "One is obliged to have something of this kind," he said smilingly, "to keep our Martha from going mad. That was the breakfast-bell, or answers for it. Fine place this for your appetite, Mr Reed." "Yes, one does get ready for one's meals," replied the guest, as he walked slowly back down the glen-like garden, toward the open window of the room in which they had been seated on the previous evening, and from which Dinah, simply dressed, but looking, with her large eyes and pale creamy cheeks, ten times as interesting as on the previous night, came out to meet them. "A guilty conscience needs no accuser," thought Reed, as they drew near, but to his intense surprise she held out her hand to him with a sweet, winning frankness, and bade him good morning. Then turning to the Major, a sensation as of a sob rising in his throat affected Reed at the tender affection that seemed to exist between the pair, as Dinah raised her lips to her father's while he embraced her. "What a brute I am!" thought Clive; and in spite of the sharp rattle of the shot seeming to ring in his ears, he told himself that he must have been wrong. "A girl like that could not be deceitful," he thought; and when a few minutes later they were seated at the table, and Martha came in, bearing a dish of fried ham, he looked hard at the stern robust woman, and wondered whether she was responsible for the nocturnal visitor. "Impossible!" he said to himself one moment, and the next he owned that it might be so. "Fifty if she's a day," he said mentally. "Well, perhaps so, and the lover has come at last." Two hours later Clive Reed was back in the great shallow gap, where a couple of teams of horses had just dragged up heavy loads of machinery and materials, Sturgess looking morose and speaking in a surly voice, busy ordering the men about the shaft to look sharp and help to unload. The click of hammer and pick was making the place echo. Masons were busy erecting a stone building; and already the place was beginning to look business-like, and as if waking up from its long, long sleep of years.