e saved the necessity of making a tack
across the narrow creek. In the morning he had, as usual, run down into
the river and to the slip-way, little suspecting that Miriam and Sep
were just above him behind the dyke, where they had sat three days
before listening to Dormer Colville's story of the little boy who was
a King. To-night he ran the boat into the coarse and wiry grass where
Septimus Marvin's own dinghy lay, half hidden by the reeds, and he
stumbled ashore clutching at the dewy grass as he climbed the side of
the dyke.

He went toward the turf-shelter half despondently, and then stopped
short a few yards away from it. For Miriam was there. He thought she was
alone, and paused to make sure before he spoke. She was sitting at the
far corner, sheltered from the north wind. For Farlingford is like a
ship--always conscious of the lee- and the weather-side, and all who
live there are half sailors in their habits--subservient to the wind.

"At last," said Loo, with a little vexed laugh. He could see her face
turned toward him, but her eyes were only dark shadows beneath her
hair. Her face looked white in the darkness. Her answering laugh had a
soothing note in it.

"Why--at last?" she asked. Her voice was frank and quietly assured in
its friendliness. They were old comrades, it seemed, and had never
been anything else. The best friendship is that which has never known
a quarrel, although poets and others may sing the tenderness of a
reconciliation. The friendship that has a quarrel and a reconciliation
in it is like a man with a weak place left in his constitution by a past
sickness. He may die of something else in the end, but the probability
is that he must reckon at last with that healed sore. The friendship may
perish from some other cause--a marriage, or success in life, one of the
two great severers--but that salved quarrel is more than likely to recur
and kill at last.

These two had never fallen out. And it was the woman who, contrary to
custom, fended the quarrel now.

"Oh! because I have been here three nights in succession, I suppose, and
did not find you here. I was disappointed."

"But you found Uncle Septimus in his study. I could hear you talking
there until quite late."

"Of course I was very glad to see him and talk with him. For it is
to him that I owe a certain half-developed impatience with the
uneducated--with whom I deal all my life, except for a few hours now and
then in the study and h