rgotten, he might
be expected to go round by the south side of the church by accident
occasionally, especially as it was the shorter way from the rectory to
the porch. He was an absent-minded man, but he always remembered, as
River Andrew himself admitted, to go north about. And his wife's grave
was overgrown by salted grass as were the rest.

Farlingford had accepted him, when his College, having no use for such
a dreamer elsewhere, gave him the living, not only with resignation, but
with equanimity. This remote parish, cut off from the busier mainland
by wide heaths and marshes, sparsely provided with ill-kept roads, had
never looked for a bustling activity in its rectors. Their forefathers
had been content with a gentleman, given to sport and the pursuits of
a country squire, marked on the seventh day by a hearty and robust
godliness. They would have preferred Parson Marvin to have handled a
boat and carried a gun. But he had his good qualities. He left them
alone. And they are the most independent people in the world.

When his wife died, his sister, the widow of an Indian officer, bustled
eastward, from a fashionable Welsh watering-place, just to satisfy
herself, as she explained to her West-country friends, that he would not
marry his cook before six months elapsed. After that period she proposed
to wash her hands of him. She was accompanied by her only child, Miriam,
who had just left school.

Six months later Septimus Marvin was called upon to give away his sister
to a youthful brother officer of her late husband, which ceremony he
performed with a sigh of relief audible in the farthest recess of the
organ loft. While the wedding-bells were still ringing, the bride, who
was not dreamy or vague like her brother, gave Septimus to understand
that he had promised to provide Miriam with a home--that he really
needed a woman to keep things going at the rectory and to watch over the
tender years of little Sep--and that Miriam's boxes were packed.

Septimus had no recollection of the promise. And his sister was quite
hurt that he should say such a thing as that on her wedding day and
spoil everything. He had no business to make the suggestion if he had
not intended to carry it out. So the bride and bridegroom went away in
a shower of good wishes and rice to the life of organized idleness, for
which the gentleman's education and talents eminently befitted him, and
Miriam returned to Farlingford with Septimus.

In th