sonage nestled together in a hollow. He entered
the house by the back way, and found his sister, the clergyman's wife,
sitting alone over her work in the parlor.

"Where is your husband, Lizzie?" he asked, taking a chair in a corner.

"William has gone out to see a sick person. He had just time enough
before he went," she added, with a smile, "to tell me about the young
lady; and he declares he will never trust himself at Aldborough with you
again until you are a steady, married man." She stopped, and looked at
her brother more attentively than she had looked at him yet. "Robert!"
she said, laying aside her work, and suddenly crossing the room to him.
"You look anxious, you look distressed. William only laughed about your
meeting with the young lady. Is it serious? Tell me; what is she like?"

He turned his head away at the question.

She took a stool at his feet, and persisted in looking up at him. "Is it
serious, Robert?" she repeated, softly.

Kirke's weather-beaten face was accustomed to no concealments--it
answered for him before he spoke a word. "Don't tell your husband till I
am gone," he said, with a roughness quite new in his sister's experience
of him. "I know I only deserve to be laughed at; but it hurts me, for
all that."

"Hurts you?" she repeated, in astonishment.

"You can't think me half such a fool, Lizzie, as I think myself,"
pursued Kirke, bitterly. "A man at my age ought to know better. I didn't
set eyes on her for as much as a minute altogether; and there I have
been hanging about the place till after nightfall on the chance of
seeing her again--skulking, I should have called it, if I had found one
of my men doing what I have been doing myself. I believe I'm bewitched.
She's a mere girl, Lizzie--I doubt if she's out of her teens--I'm old
enough to be her father. It's all one; she stops in my mind in spite of
me. I've had her face looking at me, through the pitch darkness, every
step of the way to this house; and it's looking at me now--as plain as I
see yours, and plainer."

He rose impatiently, and began to walk backward and forward in the room.
His sister looked after him, with surprise as well as sympathy expressed
in her face. From his boyhood upward she had always been accustomed to
see him master of himself. Years since, in the failing fortunes of the
family, he had been their example and their support. She had heard of
him in the desperate emergencies of a life at sea, when hundreds o