"Heavens! if as a Protestant I am to fight the first round over Infant Baptism--"

"There _is_ a font in the chapel."

"Yes. I have often wondered why."

Brother Copas appeared to meditate this as he slowly drew back his rod and made a fresh cast. Again the fly dropped short of the alder stump by a few inches, and fell delicately on the dark water below it. There was a splash--a soft gurgling sound dear to the angler's heart. Brother Copas's rod bent and relaxed to the brisk whirr of its reel as a trout took fly and hook and sucked them under.

Then followed fifteen minutes of glorious life. Even Brother Bonaday's slow blood caught the pulse of it. He watched, not daring to utter a sound, his limbs twitching nervously.

But when the fish--in weight well over a pound--had been landed and lay, twitching too, in the gra.s.ses by the Mere bank, Brother Copas, after eyeing it a moment with legitimate pride, slowly wound up his reel.

"And I am to be a Protestant! . . . Saint Peter--King Fisherman-- forgive me!"

CHAPTER IV.

CORONA COMES.

When Nurse Branscome reached the docks and inquired at what hour the _Carnatic_ might be expected, the gatekeeper pointed across a maze of dock-basins, wharves, tramway-lines, to a far quay where the great steamship lay already berthed.

"She've broken her record by five hours and some minutes," he explained. "See that train just pulling out of the station?

That carries her mails."

Nurse Branscome--a practical little woman with shrewd grey eyes-- neither fussed over the news nor showed any sign of that haste which is ill speed. Scanning the distant vessel, she begged to be told the shortest way alongside, and noted the gatekeeper's instructions very deliberately, nodding her head. They were intricate. At the close she thanked him and started, still without appearance of hurry, and reached the _Carnatic_ without a mistake. She arrived, too, a picture of coolness, though the docks lay shadeless to the afternoon sun, and the many tramway-lines radiated a heat almost insufferable.

The same quiet air of composure carried her unchallenged up a gangway and into the great ship. A gold-braided junior officer, on duty at the gangway-head, asked politely if he could be of service to her.

She answered that she had come to seek a steerage pa.s.senger--a little girl named Bonaday.

"Ach!" said a voice close at her elbow, "that will be our liddle Korona!"

Nurse Branscome turned. The voice belonged to a blond, middle-aged German, whose gaze behind his immense spectacles was of the friendliest.

"Yes--Corona: that is her name."

"So!" said the middle-aged German. "She is with my wive at this moment. If I may ascort you? . . . We will not then drouble Mister Smid' who is so busy."

He led the way forward. Once he turned, and in the faint light between-decks his spectacles shone palely, like twin moons.

"I am habby you are come," he said. "My wive will be habby. . . .

I told her a dozzen times it will be ol' right--the ship has arrived before she is agspected. . . . But our liddle Korona is so agscited, so imbatient for her well-beloved England."

He p.r.o.nounced "England" as we write it.

"So!" he proclaimed, halting before a door and throwing it open.

Within, on a cheap wooden travelling-trunk, sat a stout woman and a child. The child wore black weeds, and had--as Nurse Branscome noted at first glance--remarkably beautiful eyes. Her right hand lay imprisoned between the two palms of the stout woman, who, looking up, continued to pat the back of it softly.

"A friendt--for our Mees Korona!"

"Whad did I not tell you?" said the stout woman to the child, cooing the words exultantly, as she arose to meet the visitor.

The two women looked in each other's eyes, and each divined that the other was good.

"Good afternoon," said Nurse Branscome. "I am sorry to be late."

"But it is we who are early. . . . We tell the liddle one she must have bribed the cabdain, she was so craved to arr-rive!"

"Are you related to her?"

"Ach, no," chimed in husband and wife together as soon as they understood. "But friendts--friendts, Korona--_hein?_"

The husband explained that they had made the child's acquaintance on the first day out from New York, and had taken to her at once, seeing her so forlorn. He was a baker by trade, and by name Muller; and he and his wife, after doing pretty well in Philadelphia, were returning home to Bremen, where his brother (also a baker) had opened a prosperous business and offered him a partnership.

--"Which he can well afford," commented Frau Muller. "For my husband is beyond combet.i.tion as a master-baker; and at the end all will go to his brother's two sons. . . . We have not been gifen children of our own."

"Yet home is home," added her husband, with an expansive smile, "though it be not the Vaterland, Mees Korona--_hein?_" He eyed the child quizzically, and turned to Nurse Branscome. "She is badriotic so as you would nevar think--

"'Brit-ons nevar, nevar, nev-ar-will be Slavs!'"

He intoned it ludicrously, casting out both hands and snapping his fingers to the tune.

The child Corona looked past him with a gaze that put aside these foolish antics, and fastened itself on Nurse Branscome.

"I think I shall like you," she said composedly and with the clearest English accent. "But I do not quite know who you are. Are you fetching me to Daddy?"

"Yes," said Nurse Branscome, and nodded.

She seldom or never wasted words. Nods made up a good part of her conversation always.

Corona stood up, by this action conveying to the grown-ups--for she, too, economised speech--that she was ready to go, and at once.

Youth is selfish, even in the sweetest-born of natures.

Baker Muller and his good wife looked at her wistfully. She had come into their childless life, and had taken unconscious hold on it, scarce six days ago--the inside of a week. They looked at her wistfully. Her eyes were on Nurse Branscome, who stood for the future. Yet she remembered that they had been kind. Herr Muller, kind to the last, ran off and routed up a seaman to carry her box to the gangway. There, while bargaining with a porter, Nurse Branscome had time to observe with what natural good manners the child suffered herself to be folded in Frau Muller's ample embrace, and how prettily she shook hands with the good baker. She turned about, even once or twice, to wave her farewells.

"But she is naturally reserved," Nurse Branscome decided.

"Well, she'll be none the worse for that."

She had hardly formed this judgment when Corona went a straight way to upset it. A tuft of groundsel had rooted itself close beside the traction rails a few paces from the waterside. With a little cry-- almost a sob--the child swooped upon the weed, and plucking it, pressed it to her lips.

"I promised to kiss the first living thing I met in England," she explained.

"Then you might have begun with me," said Nurse Branscome, laughing.

"Oh, that's good--I like you to laugh! This is real England, merry England, and I used to 'spect it was so good that folks went about laughing all the time, just because they lived in it."

"Look here, my dear, you mustn't build your expectations too high.

If you do, we shall all disappoint you; which means that you will suffer."