Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/115

Rh tuned and, touching it softly, began the first of those murmuring heathenish songs to which I have since listened so often, pausing in my work, but never without a kind of terror at beauty so far above my comprehending—why, then my Master laughed no more.

He had met Godolphin that morning and run him through the thigh. And that bitterest enemy of ours still wore a crutch a month later, when we faced Master Porson before the Commissioner in Saint Aubyn's house at Clowance. At that conference (not to linger over the time between) the Commissioner showed himself pardonably suspicious of us all. He was a dry, foxy-faced man, who spoke little and at times seemed scarce to be listening; but rather turning over some deeper matters in his brain behind his grey-coloured eyes. But at length, Mr. Saint Aubyn having twice or thrice made mention of the Lady Alicia and her presence on the beach, this Sir Nicholas looked up at me sharply, and said he—"By all accounts this lady was a passenger shipped by the master at Dunquerque. It seems she was a foreign lady of birth, bearing letters commendatory to the Court of Lisbon."

"That was his story of it," Master Porson assented. "I was below and busy with the cargo at the time, and knew nothing of her presence on board until we had cleared the harbour."

"And at this moment she is a guest of Mr. Milliton's at Pengersick?" pursued Sir Nicholas, still with