"Oh, that's all right," said the lady with relief. "Only we don't want a lot of nonsense talked in here." "Seems to soothe em," continued the Master. "Afore now when I've had them violent in the casuals' cells I've sent for him. They call him the Prophet." The Master smiled to himself as the masterful lady tramped on her way. He had noticed that Edward Caspar invariably left the ward when the Reverend Spink entered to hold Divine Service; and that if the Archdeacon marched through the wards like a conqueror amid the dreadful human debris of a battle-field the visitor, sitting quietly at the bedside of some cast-away, never seemed to see him. In spite of the pressure of affairs, Ernie rarely failed to lure his father out into the sunshine on the hill. Once, as they sat together by the roadside in Beech-hangar, Ernie propounded a solemn question. "Dad." "Well." "Didn't you once say there was a Spanish strain in the real old Sussex peasant stock?" The father eyed his son obliquely. "So they say," he answered. "A Spanish galleon in the days of the Armada wrecked in Ruther Haven. That's the story. And I'm inclined to think there's something in it. Any way there's more foreign blood in the genuine peasantry of Sussex and Kent than in all the rest of England. Propinquity to the Continent, you see. All the refugees came here first--Dutchmen in the days of Alva; Huguenots after the Revocation; Royalists during the Terror; and smugglers of all sorts all the time from the days of Cæsar." That evening, as Anne Caspar brushed her hair in the bedroom before going to bed, she heard her husband in the little dressing-room talking to himself as his manner was. She stayed the sweeping motion of her hand and listened. "I met Mr. Pigott in Church Street this evening," she called. "He stopped me and said, 'What's come to Ernie?'" There was a silence; then the voice from next door answered, "She's dark. That's all I know." CHAPTER XXX REALITY A few days after his conversation with his father, Ernie took a telegram up to the Third Floor in the afternoon, and was about to descend when he heard a bedroom bell ring violently for the maid on duty. There was no maid visible. He went along the corridor. At the end of it was a passage-landing with a window looking over the sea. On the window-sill Ruth was sitting in the sun, perched as a woman riding, her work beside her. She did not see him, and for a moment he watched her fascinated: the lines of her figure, almost majestic for so young a woman; the dignity of her face; the lovely curve of her neck and shoulders; the warmth of her colouring. Her thimbled finger flashed to and fro; and the sun caught her hair, simply massed beneath her cap, and revealing in its blackness just a note of tan. Every now and then, as the sea thumped and hissed and poured on the fore-shore, she looked up.