hat placid monotone which would
have taken your breath away had you been able to understand them.
A hundred times I rejoiced that you understood no English, for your
impatience, Marquis, might have silenced him as some rare-voiced bird
is silenced by a sudden movement. Yes, Marquis, there is a locket
containing a portrait of Marie Antoinette. There are other things
also. But there is one drawback. The man himself is not anxious to come
forward. There are reasons, it appears, here in Farlingford, why he
should not seek his fortune elsewhere. To-morrow morning--"

Dormer Colville rose and yawned audibly. It almost appeared that he
regretted having permitted himself a moment's enthusiasm on a subject
which scarcely affected his interests.

"To-morrow morning I will see to it."

CHAPTER VIII. THE LITTLE BOY WHO WAS A KING

The Reverend Septimus Marvin had lost his wife five years earlier. It
was commonly said that he had never been the same man since. Which was
untrue. Much that is commonly said will, on investigation, be found to
be far from the truth. Septimus Marvin had, so to speak, been the same
man since infancy. He had always looked vaguely at the world through
spectacles; had always been at a loss among his contemporaries--a
generation already tainted by that shallow spirit of haste which
is known to-day as modernity--at a loss for a word; at a loss for a
companion soul.

He was a scholar and a learned historian. His companions were books, and
he communed in spirit with writers who were dead and gone.

Had he ever been a different man his circumstances would assuredly have
been other. His wife, for instance, would in all human probability
have been alive. His avocation might have been more suited to his
capabilities. He was not intended for a country parish, and that
practical human comprehension of the ultimate value of little daily
details, without which a pastor never yet understood his flock, was not
vouchsafed to him.

"Passen takes no account o' churchyard," River Andrew had said, and
neither he nor any other in Farlingford could account for the special
neglect to which was abandoned that particular corner of the burial
ground where the late Mrs. Marvin reposed beneath an early Victorian
headstone of singular hideousness.

Mr. Marvin always went round the other way.

"Seems as he has forgotten her wonderful quick," commented the women of
Farlingford. But perhaps they were wrong. If he had fo