CHAPTER I

In which Pam does a Good Deed, and sees a Strange Thing

Pamela sat among the rocks with her elbows on her knees and her chin on
her hands. In spite of the entrancing loveliness of her surroundings she had been reading with such interest that she had scarcely looked up in an hour. The book now lay face down on another round-topped rock, while Pamela stared at the sea, and thought about the contents of the book.

It was spring-time, and in spring Bell Bay was perhaps a thought more perfect than at any other time in the year. The wonderful little horse-shoe of its quiet haven was a jewel of colour in the dark setting of its cliff entrance. The semicircle of the high, rough stone sea-wall above the rock-strewn sands seemed to take on light from the flowering of the tiny rock plants, while the gardens at the Bell House behind that wall were just a mass of greenness and bloom.

Outside and above those gardens rose the sides of the valley, towering up into the blue of the clean, clear sky, and melting away into the woods inland. The bay was so small that the Bell House and its grounds filled the centre of it, as it were. There was no room for a "sea-front". No room for another house even--Bell Bay belonged to the Bell House.

Farther up the valley was Paramore’s--the Temperance Tea Inn--to which parties came in the season by the one narrow road that ran along below the Bell Ridge--on the north side, that was. Farther still up the valley--also on the roadside--stood the tiny church, no bigger than a room, Fuchsia Cottage, where lived Anne Lasarge, and a few more cottages--not enough to make a village--that tailed away to Folly-Ho, a hamlet on the Peterock road.

On the south side of the valley--facing the long, grey front of the old Bell House--the woods fringed the heights like a green rampart. Just in one place glimmered the white walls of Crown Hill, the beautiful country place of Sir Marmaduke Shard, K.C.

That was all there was of Bell Bay--unless you count Mainsail Cottage, sitting like a gull’s nest over the sea on the south headland, and Woodrising, the empty house so long "To Let", buried in dense woods right up at the back of the valley.

In the former lived Penberthy--pensioner--who looked after Sir Marmaduke’s little yawl--the Messenger. In the latter lived nobody but Mrs. Trewby, a caretaker; a mournful widow afflicted by bilious attacks, and living therefore in 

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