Isobel's joyful astonishment may be pictured when she discovered that her friend of the island was in very truth her own grandfather, and her happiness when she and her mother removed the next week from Marine Terrace to the Chase can scarcely be described.
"It's just like a fairy tale!" she declared. "I never thought when I sat on the top of the Scar that afternoon, looking down at the lovely house and garden, and saying what I would do if I lived there, that it could ever really come to pass. It's almost too good to be true, and I shouldn't be in the least surprised if it were only a dream after all."
It soon proved to be no dream, but a most satisfactory reality, when she saw herself installed as her grandfather's favourite companion in the very surroundings which she had so much admired. To Colonel Stewart she filled the vacant place of the little daughter he had lost in former years; and so keen was his pleasure in his newly-found grandchild, that if Isobel had not been of a thoroughly sensible nature I fear she would have run a very great risk of becoming completely spoilt. Her mother's influence and her own naturally unselfish disposition saved her from that, however, and the wholesome discipline of school life afterwards taught her to be able to take her grandfather's kindness without acquiring an undue idea of her own importance. She was very happy at the Chase, and especially delighted when Colonel Stewart made her a formal present of the desert island.
"It shall be yours, to do what you like with," he declared. "I promised to lease it to you when you found the runic cross, and I think you deserve to have it for your own. It shall be one of my presents to you on your eleventh birthday."
That happy event was to take place in the course of a few days, and to celebrate the occasion all the Sea Urchins had been invited to a garden _fête_ at the Chase, as a winding up of the club before the various children left Silversands; for it was September now--governesses were returning, schools were reopening, and the holidays were over at last.
It was a lovely autumn morning when Isobel, with a bright birthday face, looked out of the open window of her pretty bedroom, to see her island shining in the early sunshine against the sea, and the shadows falling over the lawns and gardens of the beautiful spot which was now her home.