eparing the way for that which was to be.

IV

The cottage was apparently empty. His guide and namesake looked into
the kitchen, and called up a stair which led out of it, but got no
answer.

"She will be up at the house," he said, and turned and went off up the
garden behind, while the dogs raced on in front to show the way.

Through a cleft in the high green bank topped by a thick hedge of
hawthorn, they came out into a garden of less utilitarian aspect. Here
were shrubs and flowers, palms and conifers and pale eucalyptus trees,
clumps of purple iris and clove pinks, roses just coming to the bud,
and beyond, a very charming bungalow, built solidly of gray granite
and red tiles, with a wide verandah all round. A pleasant-faced woman
in a large black sunbonnet came out of the open front door as they
went up the path.

"My wife," murmured Carre, and proceeded quietly to explain matters in
an undertone of patois.

"I hope you speak English also, Mrs. Carre," said Graeme.

"Oh yess," with a quick smile. "We are all English here."

"Surely you are Welsh," he said, for he had met just that same
cheerful type of face in Wales.

"Noh, I am Sark," she smiled again. "I can gif you a sitting-room and
a bet-room"--and they proceeded to business, and then the dogs
escorted them back to the cottage, to see the stranger fairly inducted
to his new abode, and to let him understand that they rejoiced at his
coming and would visit him often.

He thought he would be very comfortable there, but why the
sitting-room was not the bedroom he never could understand. For it was
only a quarter the size of the other, and its single window looked
into a field, and a rough granite wall clothed with tiny rock-weeds
hid all view of the road and its infrequent traffic. While the bedroom
was a room of size, and its two windows gave on to the covered well
and the cobbled forecourt, and offered passers-by, if so inclined,
oblique views of its occupant in the act of dressing if he forgot to
pull down the blind.

The windows of both rooms were set low in the massive granite walls,
and being always wide open, they offered, and indeed invited, easy
access to--say, a grave-faced gentlemanly brown dog and a spasmodic
rough-coated terrier without a tail, whenever the spirit moved them to
incursion, which it invariably did at meal-times and frequently in
between.

These two new friends of his--for they were never mere acquaintances,
but adopted