she's the very
daps of her mother--that's what everybody says.'

'But how does she come to be so lonely?'

'One of her brothers went to sea and was drowned, and t'other is in
America.'

'They were quarryowners at one time?'

The quarryman 'pitched his nitch,' and explained to the seeming stranger
that there had been three families thereabouts in the stone trade, who
had got much involved with each other in the last generation. They were
the Bencombs, the Pierstons, and the Caros. The Bencombs strained their
utmost to outlift the other two, and partially succeeded. They grew
enormously rich, sold out, and disappeared altogether from the island
which had been their making. The Pierstons kept a dogged middle course,
throve without show or noise, and also retired in their turn. The Caros
were pulled completely down in the competition with the other two, and
when Widow Caro's daughter married her cousin Jim Caro, he tried to
regain for the family its original place in the three-cornered struggle.
He took contracts at less than he could profit by, speculated more and
more, till at last the crash came; he was sold up, went away, and later
on came back to live in this little cottage, which was his wife's by
inheritance. There he remained till his death; and now his widow was
gone. Hardships had helped on her end.

The quarryman proceeded on his way, and Pierston, deeply remorseful,
knocked at the door of the minute freehold. The girl herself opened it,
lamp in hand.

'Avice!' he said tenderly; 'Avice Caro!' even now unable to get over the
strange feeling that he was twenty years younger, addressing Avice the
forsaken.

'Ann, sir,' said she.

'Ah, your name is not the same as your mother's!'

'My second name is. And my surname. Poor mother married her cousin.'

'As everybody does here.... Well, Ann or otherwise, you are Avice to me.
And you have lost her now?'

'I have, sir.'

She spoke in the very same sweet voice that he had listened to a score
of years before, and bent eyes of the same familiar hazel inquiringly
upon him.

'I knew your mother at one time,' he said; 'and learning of her death
and burial I took the liberty of calling upon you. You will forgive a
stranger doing that?'

'Yes,' she said dispassionately, and glancing round the room: 'This was
mother's own house, and now it is mine. I am sorry not to be in mourning
on the night of her funeral, but I have just been to put some flowers on
her grav