obbled
street, and, taking a seat in the stone-floored kitchen, ate and drank
and bespoke a bed. Later on, he strolled down to the quay and made
friends with the few fishermen who were loitering there. They answered
his questions readily, although he found it hard at first to pick up
again the dialect of which he himself had once made use. The little
place was scarcely changed. All progress, indeed, seemed to have
passed it by. There were a handful of fishermen, a boat-builder and a
fish-curer in the village. There was no other industry save a couple of
small farmhouses on the outskirts of the place, no railway within twelve
miles. Tourists came seldom, excursionists never. In the half contented,
half animal-like expression which seemed common to all the inhabitants,
Tavernake read easily enough the history of their uneventful days. It
was such a shelter as this, indeed, for which he had been searching.

On the second night after his arrival, he walked with the boatbuilder
upon the wooden quay. The boatbuilder's name was Nicholls, and he was
a man of some means, deacon of the chapel, with a fair connection as
a jobbing carpenter, and possessor of the only horse and cart in the
place.

"Nicholls," Tavernake said, "you don't remember me, do you?"

The boat-builder shook his head slowly and ponderously.

"There was Richard Tavernake who farmed the low fields," he remarked,
reminiscently. "Maybe you're a son of his. Now I come to think of it, he
had a boy apprenticed to the carpentering."

"I was the boy," Tavernake answered. "I soon had enough of it and went
to London."

"You'm grown out of all knowledge," Nicholls declared, "but I mind you
now. So you've been in London all these years?"

"I've been in London," Tavernake admitted, "and I think, of the two,
that Sprey-by-the-Sea is the better place."

"Sprey is well enough," the boat-builder confessed, "well enough for a
man who isn't set on change."

"Change," Tavernake asserted, grimly, "is an overrated joy. I have had
too much of it in my life. I think that I should like to stay here for
some time."

The boat-builder was surprised, but he was a man of heavy and deliberate
turn of mind and he did not commit himself to speech. Tavernake
continued.

"I used to know something of carpentering in my younger days," he said,
"and I don't think that I have forgotten it all. I wonder if I could
find anything to do down here?"

Matthew Nicholls stroked his beard tho