tion, for Neddy was almost the
only person who had constant access to her house.

Morrison, however, had very little to tell about Mrs. Day. She had come
home, and was living very much as she had lived before. The absence of
her children did not appear to make great difference in her dreary life.
The old labourer could not say that her husband treated her kindly or
unkindly. He was not willing to affirm that she was glad to be out of
the asylum, or that she was sorry. To the old man's imagination Mrs. Day
was not an interesting object; his interest had always been centred upon
the children. It was of them he talked chiefly now, telling of letters
that their father had received from them, and of the art by which he,
Morrison, had sometimes contrived to make the taciturn Day show him
their contents. The interest of passive benevolence which the young
medical student gave to Morrison's account of these children, who had
grown quite beyond the age when children are pretty and interesting,
would soon have been exhausted had the account been long; but it
happened that the old man had a more startling communication to make,
which cut short his gossip about his master's family.

He had been standing so far at the door of his little wooden house. His
old wife was moving at her household work within. Caius stood outside.
The house was a little back from the road in an open space; near it was
a pile of firewood, a saw-horse and chopping-block, with their
accompanying carpet of chips, and such pots, kettles, and household
utensils as Mrs. Morrison preferred to keep out of doors.

When old Morrison came to the more exciting part of his gossip, he poked
Caius in the breast, and indicated by a backward movement of his elbow
that the old wife's presence hampered his talk. Then he came out with an
artfully simulated interest in the weather, and, nudging Caius at
intervals, apparently to enforce silence on a topic concerning which the
young man as yet knew nothing, he wended his way with him along a path
through a thicket of young fir-trees which bordered the road.

The two men were going towards that part of the shore to which Caius was
bound. They reached the place where the child had been drowned before
the communication was made, and stood together, like a picture of the
personification of age and youth, upon the top of the grassy cliff.

"You'll not believe me," said the old man, with excitement obviously
growing within him, "bu