Mystery of the Inn by the Shore by Florence Warden

"I'm so much obliged to you, so very much obliged to you."

Clifford looked round, and saw pretty Nell Claris standing beside the two boats which he had pulled up on the bank by her direction.

"I'm afraid it must have given you a great deal of trouble. One of them was nearly full of water, I know."

"Why, yes, it wasn't too easy to get them up, because the bank slopes, and the earth is so slimy just here. But I'm very glad to have been able to do you the little service."

"It wasn't a little service; it was a great one," said Nell, with a look which Clifford felt to be intoxicating.

At that moment he heard a sound like a short, mocking laugh; and turning, with a sudden flush, to look at the river, he saw the fisherman, with a face full of scornful amusement, punting away slowly up stream toward Fleet Castle. Clifford, though he felt a little uneasy, was glad the man had gone.

"Your friends have gone back to Stroan," said Nell, who had blushed a little, on her side, when she heard the fisherman's contemptuous laugh.

"Is that a hint for me to follow their example?"

"Oh, no, indeed. My uncle said, when I told him what you were doing for us, that I was to ask you to come in and have a cup of tea with us -- if you would condescend to accept an invitation from an innkeeper and his niece?"

Nell smiled a little as she added these words; and the manner in which she uttered them showed so keen a perception of social distinctions that Clifford was confirmed in his belief that the girl was ridiculously out of her proper element in this wayside inn.

He followed her into a tiny sitting-room at the back of the inn, where they were joined by her uncle, a burly, jovial man with a round, red, honest face, who was evidently very fond of his niece, although every word each uttered seemed to emphasize the strange difference in manners and speech which existed between them.

"Proud to know you, sir," said George Claris, when Clifford held out his hand. "Proud to know anybody my Nell thinks worth knowing. She's mighty particular, is Nell. Lor', what wouldn't your friend, Mr. Jordan there, have given for an invite to tea in here like this! Eh, Nell?"

Nell blushed, and turned her uncle's attention to his tea, while Clifford, in some surprise, enjoyed the knowledge that he had cut Jordan out without even a struggle.

Nell herself explained this presently, when her uncle had been called away by press of business in the bar, and the two young people were left sitting together, looking through the open glass door into the garden behind the inn.

"I'm afraid you will think I didn't treat your friend very well, after setting him to work to pitch that shed for us," she said, with a pretty blush in her cheeks, as she looked down at the table-cloth, and thus enabled Clifford to see that her long, curled, golden-brown eyelashes were the prettiest he had ever seen.

"I'm afraid he will think so," said Clifford, with affected solemnity. "I think myself that, after such heavy work as that, he did deserve a cup of tea."

Nell looked up in some distress, her blue eyes brighter with excitement, and her voice quite tremulous in its earnestness.

"Ah, you don't know! " she said, quickly. "I am not ungrateful, but I am in a very difficult position, and I have to be careful how I treat people. Don't you know yourself that a great many men, gentlemen too -- or they call themselves so -- think they have a right to treat a girl who lives at an inn differently from other girls? Surely you must know that?"

Clifford grew red, conscious that the girl had penetrated a weak spot in Willie's social armor.

"Well, but -- "