Quite a number were getting out of the train as it drew up, nearly punctual to time. For a moment he felt bewildered, and was moving rapidly among the alighting pa.s.sengers, scanning each face. But none seemed to answer the description given by Violet Clinock's glowing pen, as to her friend's outward appearance.

Then he became aware of being himself a centre of interest. A girl was standing there, looking intently at him--a girl, plainly dressed, with a pale face and golden hair framed in a wide black hat, and her straight carriage and erectly held head made her look taller than she actually was. As he turned, an exclamation escaped her, and the colour suffused her cheeks, leaving them paler than before. And the look in her eyes was positively a startled one. Small wonder that it was so, for, standing there in the hurrying throng, Melian Seward almost thought she was looking at her dead father.

The likeness was extraordinary. The same face, the same features, even the cut of the grizzling, pointed beard; the same height, the same set of the shoulders. Good Heavens! The farewell on the terminus platform, the joke about the insurance ticket--small wonder that she should have reeled unsteadily as though beneath a shock. Mervyn made a hasty step forward, both hands extended.

"My dear child, there is no mistaking you," he said warmly. "You have the regular Mervyn stamp. But you are not looking at all the thing,"

with a glance of very great concern. "Well, well, we'll soon put that right here. Come along now. Porter, take this lady's things. Come and show him what you've got in the van, dear."

He took her arm, and Melian, who had not expected anything like so affectionate a welcome, felt in her present tottery state inclined to break down utterly. This he saw, and kept her answering questions about herself, and other things, the while the luggage was being got out and taken across.

"You will have to get outside of a hot cup of tea, dear, while they are loading up the things," he said, leading the way to the refreshment room. "Oh, and by the by--" For the idea had come back to him, and now he put it to her that she would not be up to a five mile drive in an open trap, so it would only mean a little longer to wait while he went across to the inn opposite and ordered a closed one. But opposition met him at once.

"Why, Uncle Seward," she exclaimed, "that's the very thing I've been looking forward to--a glorious open air drive through the lovely country, and it's such a ripping afternoon. Do let's have it. Why, it'll do me all the world of good. Fancy being shut up in a close, fusty fly! And there's going to be such a ripping sunset too, I could see there was coming along in the train. No. Do let's drive in the open."

"Certainly, dear. I was only thinking that after a bad bout of 'flu'

you have to be careful--very careful."

"Yes--yes. But this air--why, it has done me good already; it's doing me good every minute. And I've plenty of wraps. The drive will be ripping."

He looked at her admiringly. The colour had come back to her cheeks and the blue eyes danced with delighted antic.i.p.ation.

"Very well," he said. "Here's your tea. Is it all as you like it?

Yes? Well, I'll just go and see that all your things are aboard."

He went into the bar department, drank a gla.s.s of brandy and water, then went out to the waggonette. Everything was stowed safe and snug. There was certainly not a "mountain of luggage" he noticed, but it struck him that Melian's "plenty of wraps" was a bit of imagination. He shed his fur coat and threw a French cloak over his shoulders. Then he went back to her.

She was ready, and the blue eyes had taken on quite a new light--very different eyes now, to when their sole look out was bounded by a patch of grey murk as a background to bizarre and hideous patterns in chimney pots.

"Here's the shandradan, dear. Now are you absolutely dead cert you're equal to a five mile open drive. Here--put on this."

"This" was the fur coat--and she objected.

"Tut-tut, I'm skipper of this ship, and I won't have opposition. So--in you get."

He had hoisted it on to her, and now enveloped in it she climbed to the front seat beside him. He arranged a corresponding thickness of double rug over her knees.

"Thank you, sir," said the porter, catching what was thrown to him.

"Beg pardon, Mr Mervyn," he went on, sinking his voice, "but has anything more been 'eard about--"

But Mervyn drew his whip across the pony's hind quarters with a sharpness that that long suffering quadruped had certainly never merited, and the vehicle sprang into lively motion, which was all the answer the ill-advised querist obtained.

"Wasn't he asking you something?" said Melian, as they spun over the railway bridge above the station. The town lay beneath and behind; an old church tower just glimpsed above tall bare elms.

"I dare say. But if we are going to get home before you get chilly, we can't stop to answer all sorts of idiotic questions."

Even then the reply struck Melian as odd, less so perhaps than the change in her kinsman's manner while making it. But she said:

"Before I get chilly. Why I'm wrapped up like--Shackleton, or Peary, or any of them. In your coat too. It was quite wrong of you to have insisted upon my wearing it, and I had plenty of wraps."

"Had you? As a prologue to our time together child, I may as well tell you I am a man of fads. One is that of being skipper in my own ship.

You obeyed orders, so there's no more to be said."

It was put so kindly, so pleasantly. The tone was everything, and again the girl felt a lump rise to her throat, for it reminded her all of her dead father. Just the sort of thing he would have said; just the sort of tone in which he would have said it.

CHAPTER TEN.

OF THE BRIGHTENING OF HEATH HOVER.

They had left the outskirts of the town behind, and were bowling along a tree-hung road, which in summer would have been a green tunnel. The brown woods stood out above the whitened landscape, sombre in their winter nakedness, but always beautiful, over beyond an open, snow powdered stubble. Then between coverts of dark firs, where pheasants crowed, flapping their way up to their nightly roost. Past a hamlet embedded in tall, naked trees, then more dark firwoods interstudded with birch where the heathery openings broke the uniform evergreen--then out again for a s.p.a.ce--on a bit of heathery upland which would be glowing crimson in golden August.

"You can see around here for a bit," said Mervyn, pointing with his whip. "Away there on the ridge, that tower is Lower Gidding, so called, presumably because Upper Gidding, ten miles away, is about two hundred feet lower down to the sea level. Beyond that last wooded ridge but one, is my shop--our shop I mean."

"It's lovely," replied the girl looking round with animation, and taking in the whole landscape.

"Yes, perfectly lovely. And look. Here's the sunset I told you we were going to get."

On the north eastern sky line, an opaque bank of clouds had heaved up--a bank of clouds that seemed to bode another snowfall. The sun, sinking in a fiery bed, away in the cloudless west, was touching this--and lo, in a trice, the mountainous ma.s.ses of the rising cloud-tier were first tinged, than bathed in a flood of glowing copper red. Between, the long tongues of dark woodland stood out from the whitened ground. The bark of a dog, from this or that distant farmhouse, came up clear on the silent distance, and then from this or that covert, arose the melodious hoot of owls, answering each other.

"What a picture!" cried the girl, turning an animated face upon her new guardian. "Heavens, what a picture! And to think that this time yesterday I was staring at a row of hideous black chimney pots under a hideous murky sky. Not only yesterday, but day after day before! And-- Uncle Seward, you _live_ in the midst of _this_!"

Mervyn smiled to himself, then at her, and his smile was a very good one to behold.

"Yes, dear, I do," he answered gently. "And now you are going to as well."

Down a steep road between dark woods, then an opening. A long reach of ice cleft their depth; then a sudden quacking as several wild duck sprang upwards from an open hole by the sluice, and swished high above their heads.

"Wild duck, aren't they?" cried the girl, turning her head to watch them, then looking up the frozen expanse. "Why it might be some lake in the middle of the backwoods of Canada, such as one reads about."

"Yes, so it might. I can tell you you haven't come into exactly a tame part, even in our southern counties, which reminds me that I didn't sufficiently rub it into you that you would have to--well--er--rough it a bit."

"If you had, that would have made it better still," was the answer. "I prefer country places that are not too civilised."

"That's fortunate," rejoined Mervyn with a pleased smile, "for you'll be exactly suited as far as that goes, in my shack."

Up another steep bit of road at a foot's pace. It was quite dusk now, but a golden moon, at half, rising over the tree-tops, threw a glitter upon the frosty banks. Quite close by an owl hooted.

"Oh, but this is too lovely for anything," cried Melian. "By the way, what on earth are people talking about when they talk about the hoot of an owl being dismal. Why, it's melodious to a degree."

"Great minds skip together, dear. That's just what I think."

In his own mind the speaker was thinking something else; thinking it too, with a great glow of satisfaction. They would get on splendidly together. All her ideas, so far expressed, were the exact counterpart of his own. What a gold mine he had lighted on when he had opened Violet Clinock's letter but a couple of days back. Then he became aware that Melian had turned, with a quick movement, and was gazing at him with a curious--he even fancied half-startled--look.

"That was exactly one of father's expressions," she said slowly. "And-- do you know, Uncle Seward, you _are_ so like him."

"Am I, dear?" was the answer, made very gently. "All the better, because then I shall be all the more able, as far as possible, to replace him. But--here we are--at home."

The waggonette had topped the rise, and was now descending a similarly wood-fringed road. On the left front extended another long, narrow, triangular expanse of ice; set in its sombre, tree-framed encasing.

Below the broad end of this a light or two gleamed.