the village of Farlingford straggled upward in one long
street. Farlingford had once been a town of some commercial prosperity.
Its story was the story of half a dozen ports on this coast--a harbour
silted up, a commerce absorbed by a more prosperous neighbour nearer to
the railway.

Below the churchyard was the wide street which took a turn eastward at
the gates and led straight down to the river-side. Farlingford Quay--a
little colony of warehouses and tarred huts--was separated from
Farlingford proper by a green, where the water glistened at high tide.
In olden days the Freemen of Farlingford had been privileged to graze
their horses on the green. In these later times the lord of the manor
pretended to certain rights over the pasturage, which Farlingford, like
one man, denied him.

"A mystery," repeated River Andrew, waiting very clearly for Mr. Dormer
Colville to translate the suggestive word to the French gentleman. But
Colville only yawned. "And there's few in Farlingford as knew Frenchman
as well as I did."

Mr. Colville walked toward the church porch, which seemed to appeal to
his sense of the artistic; for he studied the Norman work with the eye
of a connoisseur. He was evidently a cultured man, more interested in a
work of art than in human story.

River Andrew, seeing him depart, jingled the keys which he carried in
his hand, and glanced impatiently toward the older man. The Marquis
de Gemosac, however, ignored the sound as completely as he had ignored
River Andrew's remarks. He was looking round him with eyes which had
once been dark and bright, and were now dimly yellow. He looked from
tomb to tomb, vainly seeking one that should be distinguished, if only
by the evidence of a little care at the hands of the living. He looked
down the wide grass-grown street--partly paved after the manner of the
Netherlands--toward the quay, where the brown river gleamed between the
walls of the weather-beaten brick buildings. There was a ship lying
at the wharf, half laden with hay; a coasting craft from some of the
greater tidal rivers, the Orwell or the Blackwater. A man was sitting on
a piece of timber on the quay, smoking as he looked seaward. But there
was no one else in sight. For Farlingford was half depopulated, and
it was tea-time. Across the river lay the marshes, unbroken by tree or
hedge, barren of even so much as a hut. In the distance, hazy and grey
in the eye of the North Sea, a lighthouse stood dimly, li