the
presence of his niece, Miriam Liston.

"Ah, is that you?" asked the rector, holding out a limp hand. "Yes. I
remember Sep was allowed to sit up till half-past eight in the hope that
you might come round to see us. Well, Loo, and how are you? Yes--yes."

And he looked vaguely out to sea, repeating below his breath the words
"Yes--yes" almost in a whisper, as if communing secretly with his own
thoughts out of hearing of the world.

"Of course I should come round to see you," answered Barebone. "Where
else should I go? So soon as we had had tea and I could change my
clothes and get away from that dear Mrs. Clubbe. It seems so strange to
come back here from the racketing world--and France is a racketing world
of its own--and find everything in Farlingford just the same."

He had shaken hands with the rector and with Miriam Liston as he spoke,
and his speech was not the speech of Farlingford men at all, but rather
of Septimus Marvin himself, of whose voice he had acquired the ring of
education, while adding to it a neatness and quickness of enunciation
which must have been his own; for none in Suffolk could have taught it
to him.

"Just the same," he repeated, glancing at the book Miriam had laid aside
for a moment to greet him and had now taken up again. "That book must be
very large print," he said, "for you to be able to read by this light."

"It is large print," answered the girl, with a friendly laugh, as she
returned to it.

"And you are still resolved to be a sailor?" inquired Marvin, looking
at him with kind eyes for ever asleep, it would appear, in some long
slumber which must have been the death of one of the sources of human
energy--of ambition or of hope.

"Until I find a better calling," answered Loo Barebone, with his eager
laugh. "When I am away I wonder how any can be content to live in
Farlingford and let the world go by. And when I am here I wonder how
any can be so foolish as to fret and fume in the restless world while he
might be sitting quietly at Farlingford."

"Ah," murmured the rector, musingly, "you are for the world. You, with
your capacities, your quickness for learning, your--well, your lightness
of heart, my dear Loo. That goes far in the great world. To be light
of heart--to amuse. Yes, you are for the world. You might do something
there."

"And nothing in Farlingford?" inquired Barebone, gaily; but he turned,
as he spoke, and glanced once more at Miriam Liston as if in some dim