of mezzotints and etchings.

"But," he said, interrupting himself with evident reluctance, "I am
forgetting my obligations. Let me present to you my companion, an old
friend, the Marquis de Gemosac."

The two gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Marvin, knowing no French, proceeded
to address the stranger in good British Latin, after the manner of the
courtly divines of his day. Which Latin, from its mode of pronunciation,
was entirely unintelligible to its hearer.

In return, the rector introduced the two strangers to his niece, Miriam
Liston.

"The mainstay of my quiet house," he added, with his vague and dreamy
smile.

"I have already heard of you," said Dormer Colville at once, with his
modest deference, "from my cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence."

He seemed, as sailors say, never to be at a loose end; but to go through
life with a facile readiness, having, as it were, his hands full of
threads among which to select, with a careless affability, one that must
draw him nearer to high and low, men and women, alike.

They talked together for some minutes, and, soon after the discovery
that Miriam Liston was as good a French scholar as himself, and
therefore able to converse with the Marquis de Gemosac, Colville
regretted that it was time for them to return to their simple evening
meal at "The Black Sailor."

"Well," said Colville to Monsieur de Gemosac, as they walked slowly
across the green toward the inn, embowered in its simple cottage-garden,
all ablaze now with hollyhocks and poppies--"well, after your glimpse at
this man, Marquis, are you desirous to see more of him?"

"My friend," answered the Frenchman, with a quick gesture, descriptive
of a sudden emotion not yet stilled, "he took my breath away. I can
think of nothing else. My poor brain is buzzing still, and I know not
what answers I made to that pretty English girl. Ah! You smile at my
enthusiasm; you do not know what it is to have a great hope dangling
before the eyes all one's life. And that face--that face!"

In which judgment the Marquis was no doubt right. For Dormer Colville
was too universal a man to be capable of concentrated zeal upon any one
object. He laughed at the accusation.

"After dinner," he answered, "I will tell you the little story as it was
told to me. We can sit on this seat, outside the inn, in the scent of
the flowers and smoke our cigarette."

To which proposal Monsieur de Gemosac assented readily enough. For he
was an old man, an