"'Who taught you Latin?' he asked suddenly.

"'Mrs. Lovyes taught me the rudiments,' I began; and with that he led
me on to talk of her, but with some cunning. For now he would divert
me to another topic and again bring me back to her, so that it all
seemed the vagrancies of a boy's inconsequent chatter.

"Mrs. Lovyes, who was remotely akin to the Lord Proprietor, had come
to Tresco three years before, immediately after her marriage, and, it
was understood, at her husband's wish. I talked of her readily, for,
apart from what I owed to her bounty, she was a woman most sure to
engage the affections of any boy. For one thing she was past her
youth, being thirty years of age, tall, with eyes of the kindliest
grey, and she bore herself in everything with a tender toleration,
like a woman that has suffered much.

"Of the other topics of this conversation there was one which later I
had good reason to remember. We had caught a shark twelve feet long at
the Poul that day, and the shark fairly divided my thoughts with Mrs.
Lovyes.

"'You bleed a fish first into the sea,' I explained. 'Then you bait
with a chad's head, and let your line down a couple of fathoms. You
can see your bait quite clearly, and you wait.'

"'No doubt,' said Robert; 'you wait.'

"'In a while,' said I, 'a dim lilac shadow floats through the clear
water, and after a little you catch a glimpse of a forked tail and
waving fins and an evil devil's head. The fish smells at the bait and