on with an article on Education in
which I happened to be interested. I roused myself from my abstraction
to hear Julia mentioning to the strange man the name of Sea-Strand
Cottage as our abode, and describing in her exaggerated fashion its
location and appearance.

"At the utmost end of Everywhere, and looking like secret
assassination, nothing less, when you get there," my sister was saying.

The man, as it happened, knew the place well. "It was the advertisement
of Sea-Strand Cottage which brought me to Starbay," he said. "But when
I saw the place, I----"

"You didn't like it! No more did I!" Julia said.

"However, the caretaker seemed a comfortable sort of body, and I was
assured an excellent cook," the man continued.

Julia, her hands in her coat-pockets, bent her supple body forward
across the table, bringing her eager face nearer to the stranger's.
"Did you see her?--Mrs Ragg?" she asked.

He had seen her.

"Well?"

"She seemed all right," he said; and Julia lay back, disappointed, in
her chair again.

"To me she seems all wrong," she said.

When I thought the conversation had lasted long enough I took Julia
away from the library. Mrs Ragg had declared herself unable to have our
meal ready before three o'clock in the afternoon. We went into a
pastry-cook's therefore, and Julia ate a fair supply of tarts and
custards, and insisted on taking away with her a selection from the
store. "You keep yourself in hand for the chicken cooked by Mrs Ragg; I
intend to be independent of it," she said, and walked home with her
indigestible provender.

As we neared Sea-Strand Cottage we saw, coming towards it from the
opposite direction, our new acquaintance of the reading-room. We met by
the gate.

"I have to do a constitutional of so many prescribed miles every
morning," he said. "After our conversation just now, I naturally bent
my steps in this direction."

"Do walk this way sometimes," Julia said, flashing her smile upon him.
"If, after a few days, you should see nothing of us, you might bring a
policeman with you and search for our remains."

He smiled too, and said he would certainly do so. "I saw two or three
men here as I went by, just now," he said; "they might have been the
assassins you are expecting, but they looked uncommonly like every-day
carpenters and workmen."

"Coming out of the house, do you mean? _Men?_" Julia asked, instantly
on the alert.

"Not from the house--from the outhouse," he