in, was the text upon which John
Turner seemed to base the sleepy discourse of his life. For each of us
is a living sermon to his fellows, and, it is to be feared, the majority
are warnings.

Turner had dragged on his thick overcoat, not without Loo's assistance,
and, with the collar turned up about his ears, he went out into the
night, leaving the three persons whom he had found in the drawing-room
standing in the hall looking at the door which he closed decisively
behind him. "Seize your happiness while you can," he had urged. "If
not--" and the decisive closing of a door on his departing heel said the
rest.

The clocks struck ten. It was not worth while going back to the
drawing-room. All Farlingford was abed in those days by nine o'clock.
Barebone took his coat and prepared to follow Turner. Miriam was already
lighting her bedroom candle. She bade the two men good night and went
slowly upstairs. As she reached her own room she heard the front door
closed behind Loo and the rattle of the chain under the uncertain
fingers of Septimus Marvin. The sound of it was like the clink of that
other chain by which Barebone had made fast his boat to the tottering
post on the river-wall.

Miriam's room was at the front of the house, and its square Georgian
windows faced eastward across the river to the narrow spit of marsh-land
and the open sea beyond it. A crescent of moon far gone on the wane,
yellow and forlorn, was rising from the sea. An uncertain path of light
lay across the face of the far-off tide-way--broken by a narrow strip of
darkness and renewed again close at hand across the wide river almost to
the sea-wall beneath the window. From this window no house could be seen
by day--nothing but a vast expanse of water and land hardly less level
and unbroken. No light was visible on sea or land now, nothing but the
waning moon in a cold clear sky.

Miriam threw herself, all dressed, on her bed with the abandonment of
one who is worn out by some great effort, and buried her face in the
pillow.

Barebone's way lay to the left along the river-wall by the side of the
creek. Turner had gone to the right, taking the path that led down the
river to the old quay and the village. Whereas Barebone must turn his
back on Farlingford to reach the farm which still crouches behind a
shelter of twisted oaks and still bears the name of Maiden's Grave;
though the name is now nothing but a word. For no one knows who the
maiden was, or w