smartly set-up man of forty or thereabouts,
who in turn translated the gist of them into French for the information
of his senior, a little white-haired gentleman whom he called "Monsieur
le Marquis."

He spoke glibly enough in either tongue, with a certain indifference of
manner. This was essentially a man of cities, and one better suited to
the pavement than the rural quiet of Farlingford. To have the gift of
tongues is no great recommendation to the British born, and River Andrew
looked askance at this fine gentleman while he spoke French. He had
received letters at the post-office under the name of Dormer Colville:
a name not unknown in London and Paris, but of which the social fame had
failed to travel even to Ipswich, twenty miles away from this mouldering
churchyard.

"It's getting on for twenty-five years come Michaelmas," put in River
Andrew. "I wasn't digger then; but I remember the burial well enough.
And I remember Frenchman--same as if I see him yesterday."

He plucked a blade of grass from the grave and placed it between his
teeth.

"He were a mystery, he were," he added, darkly, and turned to look
musingly across the marshes toward the distant sea. For River Andrew,
like many hawkers of cheap wares, knew the indirect commercial value of
news.

The little white-haired Frenchman made a gesture of the shoulders and
outspread hands indicative of a pious horror at the condition of this
neglected grave. The meaning of his attitude was so obvious that River
Andrew shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

"Passen," he said, "he don't take no account of the graves. He's what
you might call a bookworm. Always a sitting indoors reading books and
pictures. Butcher Franks turns his sheep in from time to time. But
along of these tempests and the hot sun the grass has shot up a bit.
Frenchman's no worse off than others. And there's some as are fallen in
altogether."

He indicated one or two graves where the mound had sunk, and suggestive
hollows were visible in the grass.

"First, it's the coffin that bu'sts in beneath the weight, then it's
the bones," he added, with that grim realism which is begotten of
familiarity.

Dormer Colville did not trouble to translate these general truths. He
suppressed a yawn as he contemplated the tottering headstones of
certain master-mariners and Trinity-pilots taking their long rest in
the immediate vicinity. The churchyard lay on the slope of rising ground
upon which