more sedately, and she came in to share the general enthusiasm.

But Colin sat silent.

Over and over again, with a childish persistence, the farmer told how he
had sold his farm, how he had come up with every penny he owned, how,
little by little, it had all oozed away, and how in disgust he had
decided to sell his boat, which would give him just enough money to get
back to Missouri.

"But now, Mary," he said, "we can go back and get a better farm than we
ever had, and we'll have a house in the village so that the children can
go to a good school, and you'll have lots o' friends, and pretty things
about you. It's been hard, neighbors, I tell you," he said, looking
round; "but the luck has turned at last."

Colin said not a word, but kept his eyes fixed on the table. His host,
the mussel-gatherer, whose stone he had been examining, noticed this,
but the newcomer was boisterous in his joy. He babbled of the wealth
that was his, until if the stone had been a diamond of equal size, it
would not have sufficed to have financed his dreams.

But the boy with the instruments on the table before him, said not a
word of congratulation or delight. He had only seen the pearl for a
moment, but he knew.

With hearty and jovial hospitality, the farmer invited every one in the
room to come and stay with him as soon as he was settled down. He would
show them, he said, what real life was like on a farm.

Suddenly he stopped.

"Mister!" he said, in an altered voice.

Colin, sitting alone, still beside his testing instruments, did not look
up.

"Mister!" he said again.

In spite of himself the boy raised his eyes. Do what he might, he could
not keep the sorrow out of them, and those of the finder of the pearl
met his fairly.

The room was full of people but it grew still as death.

The woman clasped her husband's arm and gave a low moan. He touched her
shoulder gently.

"Mister," he said again, with a humbleness that seemed strangely gentle
after all his bluster and brag, "will you look at this and tell me what
you think it's worth?"

"I'm not an expert," the boy said hastily. "I couldn't judge its value.
You ought to take it to some one that knows all about these things."

"I can see what you think," the farmer said with a pitiful, sad smile;
"you think it isn't worth much. Is it worth anything at all?"

Colin took the discolored pearl and looked at it closely. He put it on
the scales and weighed it carefully, measu