ide was gone, and lost, and forgotten.

Stephen Orry had looked down from his great height at the encounter
on the floor, and his dull, slow eyes had filled, for in some way
that he could not follow there had come to him at that sweet sight
the same deep yearning that had pained him in the boat. And seeing
how little Sunlocks was rapt, Stephen struggled hard with himself and
said, turning to the Governor:

"Now's the time for me to slip away."

Then they left the room, unnoticed of the busy people on the floor.

Two hours later, after little Sunlocks, having first missed his
father, his life's friend and only companion, had cried a little, and
soon ceased to cry out of joy of his new comradeship, and had then
nestled down his sunny head on the pillow where little Greeba's curly
poll also lay, with the doll between him and her, and some marbles in
his hand to comfort his heart, Stephen Orry, unable to drag himself
away, was tramping the dark roads about the house. He went off at
length, and was seen no more at Castletown for many years thereafter.

Now this adoption of Little Sunlocks into the family of the Governor
was an incident that produced many effects, and the first of them was
the serious estrangement of Adam and his wife. Never had two persons
of temperaments so opposed lived so long in outward harmony. Her
face, like some mountain country, revealed its before and after. Its
spring must have been keen and eager, its summer was overcast, and
its winter would be cold and frozen. She was not a Manxwoman, but
came of a family of French refugees, settled as advocates on the
north of the island. Always vain of show, she had married in her
early womanhood, when Adam Fairbrother was newly returned from
Barbary, and his adventures abroad were the common gossip and
speculation. But Adam had disappointed her ambition at the outset by
dropping into the ruts of a homely life. Only once had she lifted
him out of them, and that was after twenty years, when the whim
and wisdom of the Duke had led him to visit Lague; and then her
impatience, her importunity, her fuss and flurry, and appeals in the
name of their children, had made him Governor. Meantime, she had
borne him six sons in rapid succession during the first ten years of
marriage, and after an interval of ten other years she had borne a
daughter. Four and twenty years the good man had lived at peace with
her, drained of his serenity by her restlessness, and of his