"

"I shan't be really dead, silly," Richard told her. "We're bound to meet
again some day. People who love each other can't help meeting again. Old
nurse told me so, and she knows everything. Good-bye, Elfrida." He
kissed her. "Good-bye, Edred, old chap. I'd like to kiss you too, if you
don't mind. I know boys don't, but in the times I'm going to men kiss
each other. Raleigh and Drake did, you know."

The boys kissed shyly and awkwardly.

"And now, good-bye," said Richard, and stepped inside the crossed
triangles of moon-seeds.

"I wish," he said slowly, "oh, dear Mouldiwarps of Arden, grant me these
last wishes. I wish Edred and Elfrida may never be able to tell what I
have done. And I wish that in a year they may forget what I have done,
and let them not be unhappy about me, because I shall be very happy. I
know I shall," he added doubtfully, and paused.

"Oh, Dickie, _don't_," the other children cried out together. He went
on--

"I wish my uncle may restore the Castle, and take care of the poor
people so that there _aren't_ any poor people, and every one's
comfortable, just as I meant to do."

He took off his cap and coat and flung them outside the circle, his
boots too.

"I wish I may go back to James the First's time, and live out my life
there, and do honor in my life and death to the house of Arden."

The children blinked. Dickie and Tinkler and the white seal were gone,
and only the empty ring of moon-seeds lay on the sand.

* * * * *

"Shocking bathing fatality," the newspapers said. "Lord Arden drowned.
The body not yet recovered."

It never was recovered, of course. Elfrida and Edred said nothing. No
wonder, their elders said. The shock was too great and too sudden.

The father of Edred and Elfrida is Lord Arden now. He has done all that
Dickie would have done. He has made Arden the happiest and most
prosperous village in England, and the stream beside which Dickie bade
farewell to his cousins flows, a broad moat round the waters of the
Castle, restored now to all its own splendor.

There is a tablet in the church which tells of the death by drowning of
Richard, Sixteenth Lord Arden. The children read it every Sunday for a
year, and knew that it did not tell the truth. But by the time the
moon-seeds had grown and flowered and shed their seeds in the Castle
garden they ceased to know this, and talked often, sadly and fondly, of
dear cousin Dickie who was drowne