Chapter 6

PURE ACCIDENT.

During the next week or so, as chance would have it, Cleer Trevennack
fell in more than once on her walks with Eustace Le Neve and Walter
Tyrrel. They had picked up acquaintance in an irregular way, to be
sure; but Cleer hadn't happened to be close by when her father uttered
those strange words to his wife, "It was he who did it; it was he who
killed our boy"; nor did she notice particularly the marked abruptness
of Tyrrel's departure on that unfortunate occasion. So she had no such
objection to meeting the two young men as Trevennack himself not
unnaturally displayed; she regarded his evident avoidance of Walter
Tyrrel as merely one of "Papa's fancies." To Cleer, Papa's fancies
were mysterious but very familiar entities; and Tyrrel and Le Neve
were simply two interesting and intelligent young men--the squire of
the village and a friend on a visit to him. Indeed, to be quite
confidential, it was the visitor who occupied the larger share of
Cleer's attention. He was so good-looking and so nice. His open face
and pink and white complexion had attracted her fancy from the very
first; and the more she saw of him the more she liked him.

They met often--quite by accident, of course--on the moor and
elsewhere. Tyrrel, for his part, shrank somewhat timidly from the
sister of the boy, for his share in whose death he so bitterly
reproached himself; yet he couldn't quite drag himself off whenever he
found himself in Cleer's presence. She bound him as by a spell. He was
profoundly attracted to her. There was something about the pretty
Cornish girl so frank, so confiding, in one word, so magnetic, that
when once he came near her he couldn't tear himself away as he felt he
ought to. Yet he could see very well, none the less, it was for
Eustace Le Neve that she watched most eagerly, with the natural
interest of a budding girl in the man who takes her pure maiden fancy.
Tyrrel allowed with a sigh that this was well indeed; for how could he
ever dream, now he knew who she was, of marrying young Michael
Trevennack's sister?

One afternoon the two friends were returning from a long ramble across
the open moor, when, near a little knoll of bare and weathered rock
that rose from a circling belt of Cornish heath, they saw Cleer by
herself, propped against the huge boulders, with her eyes fixed
intently on a paper-covered novel. She looked up and smiled as they
approached; and the young men, turning aside from their ill-marked
path, came over and stood by her. They talked for awhile about the
ordinary nothings of society small-talk, till by degrees Cleer chanced
accidentally to bring the conversation round to something that had
happened to her mother and herself a year or two