emony ended, and while the
elders filed out the Inspector walked over for a few words with Hester.

"Ever since I learnt your name, Miss Marvin--excuse me, it is not a common
one--I have been wanting to ask you a question. I used to have an old
friend--Jeremy Marvin--who lived at Warwick, and found for me some scores
of old books in his time. I was wondering--"

"He was my father, sir."

"Indeed? Then, please, you must let me shake hands with his daughter.
Yes, yes,"--with a glance down at her black skirt--"I heard of his death,
and with a real sense of bereavement."

"I have addressed and posted many a parcel to you, sir, in the days before
I left home to earn my living."

"And you weren't going to tell me that? You left me to find out--yes,
yes; 'formidable Inspector,' and that sort of thing, eh? I'm not an ogre,
though. Now this little discovery has just put the finishing touch to a
delightful morning!"

Hester, encouraged by his smile, laughed merrily, and so did he; less at
the spoken words than because of the good gladness brimming their hearts.

"But tell me," he went on, becoming serious again, "if a child, out of
shyness, hid from you a small secret of that sort, you would be sorry--eh?
And you would rightly be sorry, because by missing that little of his
entire trust you had by so much fallen short of being a perfect teacher."

"And two of these children," thought Hester, with a glance at Clem and
Myra, "solemnly believe I am a witch!"

As the Inspector went down the hill towards the ferry, he overtook another
and older acquaintance in an old college friend. This was Sir George
Dinham of Troy, who had attended the ceremony uninvited, and greatly to
the awe of everyone assembled--the Inspector and Hester alone excepted.
Indeed, his presence had bidden fair at the start to upset the
proceedings; for Parson Endicott and Mr. Sam had both approached him hat
in hand, and begged him, not without servility, to preside. This proposal
he had declined with his habitual shy, melancholy smile, and shrunk away
to a back row of the audience. In his great house over Troy he lived a
recluse: a scholar, a childless man, the last of his race, rarely seen by
the townsfolk, of whom two-thirds at least were his tenants. He had heard
of the Inspector's coming, and some ray of remembered affection had
enticed him forth from his shell, to listen. Now, at the sound of the
Inspector's footstep on the road behind hi