of
alders like a slough and slipped down a beach of flat pebbles to the head
waters of a tidal creek, Mr. Molesworth rubbed his eyes with a start.
Had the stream been a Naiad she could not have given him the go-by more
coquettishly.

He rubbed his eyes, and then with a short gasp of wonder--almost of
terror--involuntarily looked around for Sir John. Here before him was a
shore, with a church beside it, and at the far end a whitewashed cottage--
surely the very shore, church, cottage, of Sir John's dream! Yes, there
was the stone cross before the porch; and here the grid-fashioned church
stile; and yonder under the string-course the scaffold-hole with the grass
growing out of it!

If Mr. Molesworth's hands had been steady when he tied on his May-fly,
they trembled enough now as he hurriedly put up his tackle and disjointed
his rod: and still, and again while he hastened across to the cottage
above the rocky spit--the cottage with the larch plantation above and in
the garden a laburnum aslant and in bloom--his eyes sought the beach for
Sir John.

The cottage was a large one, as Sir John had described. It was, in fact,
a waterside inn, with its name, The Saracen's Head, painted in black
letters along its whitewashed front and under a swinging signboard.
Looking up at the board Mr. Molesworth discerned, beneath its dark
varnish, the shoulders, scimitar, and grinning face of a turbaned Saracen,
and laughed aloud between incredulity and a sense of terror absurdly
relieved. This, then, was Sir John's black man!

But almost at the same moment another face looked over the low hedge--the
face of a young girl in a blue sun-bonnet: and Mr. Molesworth put out a
hand to the gate to steady himself.

The girl--she had heard his laugh, perhaps--gazed down at him with a frank
curiosity. Her eyes were honest, clear, untroubled: they were also
extremely beautiful eyes: and they were more. As Mr. Molesworth to his
last day was prepared to take oath, here were the very eyes, as here was
the very face and here the very form, of the Margaret whom he had suffered
for, and suffered to be lost to him, twenty-five years ago. It was
Margaret, and she had not aged one day.

In Margaret's voice, too, seeing that he made no motion to enter, she
spoke down to him across the hedge.

"Are you a friend, sir, of the gentleman that was here just now?"

"Sir John Crang?" Mr. Molesworth just managed to command his voice.

"I don't know hi