way. The door had stood open then, with a panel of warm
firelight lying across the roadway, and as he halted and peered into
the room--it was a kitchen, and the light from the open hearth glinted
on rows of china plates ranged along the dresser--he saw two girls
beside the fire; the one seated and reading from a book in her lap, the
other on the hearth-mat half reclined against her sister's knee, over
which she had flung an arm to prop her chin as she listened.... He
remembered the sand strewn on the slate floor, the fresh sea-smell in
this room so confidingly open to the night--the scene so intimate, so
homely, that the traveller standing in the doorway with the sea-spray
on his cloak could scarcely believe in the tide-races across which he
had been voyaging for hours. He stood, the hum of them in his ears, a
doubtful intruder; and while he stood, the girl in the chair had risen
and bade him good evening in purest English.

"You have come by the boat? You will be from the mainland?" she said,
and he wondered a little, not being used as yet to hear his country
spoken of as the mainland. "And I am going to England to-morrow," she
added. "The boat which brought you will take me over on its return
journey."

"You know England well, I expect?" He found himself saying this for
lack of anything better.

"She has never been outside the Islands," said her sister, who also had
risen. "And it is the same with me. But to-morrow she is going--" the
girl paused here, not it (seemed) in pain, but wistfully, as in a kind
of solemn awe at the prospect. "We left the door open for father. He
has a fancy to see the light across the road as he comes up the hill.
But he is late to-night at the fishing."

The Commandant, glancing around the room, divined--he could not tell
why--that these girls were motherless. His eyes fell on the open book
which the elder sister laid on the chair as she rose. The firelight
enabled him to read its page-heading, printed in thick, blunt
type--"King Lear"! These girls, the one of them about to visit unknown
England, were reading Shakespeare together.

"_Urbem quam dicunt Romam_"--he felt a wild inclination to question
them, to ask what they expected to learn of England from Shakespeare,
and from that play of all others. But being a shy man, then as ever, he
forbore, and contented himself with asking the way to the Barracks.

They went with him to the door to direct him; and so, wishing them
good-night,