As time wore on, the sky grew dark, and presently the storm was upon them. They retreated to the hut, and then Margaret remembered about the steamboat. Wilkie looked at his watch, and said they had outstayed their time; but the deluge of rain made it impossible now to set out on the return. Blount's man was despatched to warn the skipper, and they resigned themselves to await the subsidence of the storm. The last users of the hut had left a fire behind them, of which a coal or two still smouldered in the ashes; and Margaret, uneasy at the account she should have to render by-and-by, made busy in rekindling the blaze, rather than resign herself to forebodings of a maternal lecture.

"You?" was Blount's exclamation, repeated a second time, when the newcomers entered the hut; and the tone of disappointment verged closely on disgust. Joseph Naylor was his friend, but at that moment he would have preferred almost any other intruder. He was his friend, but he was also Margaret's uncle, and therefore the most unwelcome man who could have appeared. Standing by the open door and listening to the thunder and the falling rain, after despatching his boatman to the steamer, he had been building himself a castle in the air. The steamboat would be gone when his messenger reached the landing. The man, while obeying, had a.s.sured him of that, as it was only at the height of the tide that she was able to approach the island. The steamboat being gone, Margaret must take pa.s.sage back with him in his sail-boat. Landed at Lippenstock together, it would not be hard to give Wilkie the slip; and then, behind a lively trotter, they could start for parts unknown. It would be days before the family could overtake them. Ere then they would be man and wife, and the family would gladly make the best of what it could no longer prevent. He had never known Margaret so soft and sweetly amenable to influence as she had been these last two hours. Fortune seemed to have softened her mood on purpose to a.s.sist him. He felt sure he could persuade her; and here, at the very turning-point of his fate, appeared uncle Joseph, "_a G.o.d out of a machine_," to spoil all. It was unspeakably grievous.

Wilkie cried "You!" at the same moment as Walter; but the tone was different. There was hope and relief in both his face and voice, in marked contrast with the other. Consolation, hope, indemnity for slights, all shone before his view in the appearance of Rose Hillyard.

She was escorted, to be sure, but only by "old Naylor"--a man half as old again as himself, and not nearly so polished or agreeable. "The Hillyard" had often struck him as in many respects superior to Margaret Naylor. At the worst, to form one in a quintet could not but be pleasanter than he had found the part of supernumerary in a trio.

He positively beamed upon the newcomers, and would willingly have heaped wood on the fire, and even a.s.sisted Rose to make herself comfortable; but she a.s.sured him that Margaret Naylor and herself could do everything, and he must rejoin the men in the porch without, or, like Peeping Tom of Coventry, he might find himself struck blind on the spot.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.