omething important, perhaps--for all that concerned death and men's views
of death had become important now. He halted and turned irresolutely.
But the moment had gone by.

"Good-night!" he called back, and resumed his way up the village street.

Uncle Nicky, bending to replace a worn thole-pin with a new one, dropped
the pair with a clatter. In all his experience Rosewarne had never before
flung him a salutation.

"And a minute ago trying to tell me how to work the ferry!" the old man
muttered, staring after him. "The man must be ailing."

As a hunted deer puts the water between him and the hounds, Rosewarne had
hoped to shake off his worry at the ferry-crossing. But no; it dogged him
yet as he mounted the hill. Only, as a dreamer may suffer the horror of
nightmare, yet know all the while that it is a dream, he felt the
impatience and knew it for a vain thing. All his life he had been
hurrying desperately, and all his life the true moments had offered
themselves and been left ungrasped.

Before the doorway of a cottage halfway up the hill an old woman
waited to intercept him--Aunt Butson, the village schoolmistress.
She was a spinster well over sixty, and lodged with a widow woman, Sarah
Trevarthen, to whom the cottage belonged.

Rosewarne frowned at the sight of her. She wore her best cap and shawl,
and her cheeks were flushed. Behind her in the doorway sat a young
sailor, with a cage on the ground beside him and a parrot perched on his
forefinger close against his cheek. He glanced up with a shy, very
good-natured smile, touched his forelock to Rosewarne, and went on
whispering to the bird.

Aunt Butson stepped out into the roadway. "Good-evening, Mr. Rosewarne,
and glad to see you back and in health!" She dropped him a curtsey.
"If you've a minute to spare, sir."--

Confound the woman!--he had no minutes to spare. Still frowning, he
looked over her head at the young sailor, Sarah Trevarthen's boy Tom,
home from his Baltic voyage in the _Virtuous Lady_. Yes, it was Tom
Trevarthen, now a man grown. Rosewarne remembered him as a child in
frocks, tumbling about the roadway; as an urchin straddling a stick; as a
lad home (with this same parrot) from his first voyage. Who, in a world
moving at such a pace, could have a minute to spare?

Aunt Butson had plunged into her petition, and was voluble. It concerned
the new schools, of course. "She had taught reading, writing, and
ciphering for close on