as my poor old grandmother; she always knew everything
before it happened--at least, she said so afterward. What I want to know
is: how is it to be stopped? He has been round three nights running."

"Your grandmother is dead, I suppose?" said the offended captain, gazing
at the river. "Else she might have known what to do."

"I'm sorry," said Hartley, apologetically; "but I am so worried that I
hardly know what I'm saying."

"That's all right," said the captain, amiably. He drank some beer and,
leaning back on the seat, knitted his brows thoughtfully.

"He admired her from the first," he said, slowly. "I saw that. Does she
like him, I wonder?"

"It looks like it," was the reply.

The captain shook his head. "They'd make a fine couple," he said,
slowly. "As fine as you'd see anywhere. It's fate again. Perhaps he was
meant to admire her; perhaps millions of years ago----"

"Yes, yes, I know," said Hartley, hastily; "but to prevent it."

"Fate can't be prevented," said the captain, who was now on his
favourite theme. "Think of the millions of things that had to happen
to make it possible for those two young people to meet and cause this
trouble. That's what I mean. If only one little thing had been missing,
one little circumstance out of millions, Joan wouldn't have been born;
you wouldn't have been born."

Mr. Hartley attempted to speak, but the captain, laying down his pipe,
extended an admonitory finger.

"To go back only a little way," he said, solemnly, "your father had the
measles, hadn't he?"

"I don't know--I believe so," said Hartley.

"Good," said the captain; "and he pulled through 'em, else you wouldn't
have been here. Again, he happened to go up North to see a friend who
was taken ill while on a journey, and met your mother there, didn't he?"

Hartley groaned.

"If your father's friend hadn't been taken ill," said the captain, with
tremendous solemnity, as he laid his forefinger on his friend's knee,
"where would you have been?"

"I don't know," said Hartley, restlessly, "and I don't care."

"Nobody knows," said the other, shaking his head. "The thing is, as you
are here, it seems to me that things couldn't have been otherwise. They
were all arranged. When your father went up North in that light-hearted
fashion, I don't suppose he thought for a moment that you'd be sitting
here to-day worrying over one of the results of his journey."

"Of course he didn't," exclaimed Hartley, impatiently; "