I concluded; "when you're alone, forgetting is probably the best thing to do, and some ways of doing it are better than others."

For a moment she answered my look, then my laughter, after which, a notion suddenly seizing her, she left me.

"I'm just going into the cottage," said she. "No—you stay there. Sit down on the grass and read your letter," and she was gone.

My obedience was not implicit. I did not sit down. Instead I walked to the cliff's edge, and there, with all the steep fortresses of rock below me, shelving down battlement by battlement to the sea, I took Clarissa's letter from my pocket and read it.

They may have taught her many things, those two old maiden aunts, but they have not yet taught her to write or spell. It was the quaintest letter I think I have ever seen.

"Dear mister Bellairs," it ran. And how it ran! A spider's legs dipped well in ink would scarcely run more wild.

"Theer is a place out on the clifs ware I went wunse with him. I shall be theer on friday at twelve o'clock. the miss Fennells are going into yawl it is past the furst hed of the clifs. Clarissa."

That was all; but it was enough. It was more than enough. I had not hoped for so much. And yet, as I thought of her readiness to comply with my request, I realized how greatly it proved her love for that worthless young cub in London. For her, a prisoner, she was risking much, just to hear word of him.

"Will she ever listen to what I have to tell her?" said I, and, hearing my voice, Dandy came out of a rabbit-hole and looked up into my face.

"There's a rabbit hiding down there," said he.

"I don't care a damn about your rabbit," I exclaimed. "Will she listen to me—that's what I want to know?"

CHAPTER XV

Now, of course, that I know what Bellwattle has told her husband about me, I view Cruikshank in a different light. Now, moreover, that he imagines he knows my little secret, he does the same with me. I catch his eyes looking at me with a cunning expression that is humorous, too, as though he found a hidden meaning in every word I said.

Now

"This place suits your appetite," he remarked the other morning, at breakfast, when I put away my empty 

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