lder.
Tell me, is it your Uncle Grafton?"

So astonished was I at the question, and because she had divined so,
surely, that I did not answer.

"Is it?" she asked again.

"Yes," I said; "yes, in part."

And then came voices calling from the house. They had missed her.

"I am so sorry, Richard. I shall tell no one."

She laid her hand ever so lightly upon mine and was gone. I stood
staring after her until she disappeared in the door. All the way home
I marvelled, my thoughts tumultuous, my hopes rising and falling.

But when next I saw her, I thought she had forgotten.

We had little company at the Hall that year, on account of Mr. Carvel.
And I had been busy indeed. I sought with all my might to master a
business for which I had but little taste, and my grandfather
complimented me, before the season was done, upon my management.
I was wont to ride that summer at four of a morning to canter beside Mr.
Starkie afield, and I came to know the yield of every patch to a hogshead
and the pound price to a farthing. I grew to understand as well as
another the methods of curing the leaf. And the wheat pest appearing
that year, I had the good fortune to discover some of the clusters in the
sheaves, and ground our oyster-shells in time to save the crop. Many a
long evening I spent on the wharves with old Stanwix, now toothless and
living on his pension, with my eye on the glow of his pipe and my ear
bent to his stories of the sea. It was his fancy that the gift of
prophecy had come to him with the years; and at times, when his look
would wander to the black rigging in the twilight, he would speak
strangely enough.

"Faith, Mr. Richard," he would say; "tho' your father was a soldier afore
ye, ye were born to the deck of a ship-o'-war. Mark an old man's words,
sir."

"Can you see the frigate, Stanwix?" I laughed once, when he had repeated
this with more than common solemnity.

His reply rose above the singing of the locusts.

"Ay, sir, that I can. But she's no frigate, sir. Devil knows what she
is. She looks like a big merchantman to me, such as I've seed in the
Injy trade, with a high poop in the old style. And her piercin's be not
like a frigate." He said this with a readiness to startle me, and little
enough superstition I had. A light was on his seared face, and his pipe
lay neglected on the boards. "Ay, sir, and there be a flag astern of her
never yet seed on earth, nor on the waters under the earth. The tide is