cart driven by a boy, beside whom was
seated a seafaring man, apparently of good standing in the merchant
service, with his feet outside on the shaft. The vehicle went over the
main bridge, turned in upon the other bridge at the tail of the mill, and
halted by the door. The sailor alighted, showing himself to be a well-
shaped, active, and fine young man, with a bright eye, an anonymous nose,
and of such a rich complexion by exposure to ripening suns that he might
have been some connexion of the foreigner who calls his likeness the
Portrait of a Gentleman in galleries of the Old Masters. Yet in spite of
this, and though Bob Loveday had been all over the world from Cape Horn
to Pekin, and from India's coral strand to the White Sea, the most
conspicuous of all the marks that he had brought back with him was an
increased resemblance to his mother, who had lain all the time beneath
Overcombe church wall.

Captain Loveday tried the house door; finding this locked he went to the
mill door: this was locked also, the mill being stopped for the night.

'They are not at home,' he said to the boy. 'But never mind that. Just
help to unload the things and then I'll pay you, and you can drive off
home.'

The cart was unloaded, and the boy was dismissed, thanking the sailor
profusely for the payment rendered. Then Bob Loveday, finding that he
had still some leisure on his hands, looked musingly east, west, north,
south, and nadir; after which he bestirred himself by carrying his goods,
article by article, round to the back door, out of the way of casual
passers. This done, he walked round the mill in a more regardful
attitude, and surveyed its familiar features one by one--the panes of the
grinding-room, now as heretofore clouded with flour as with stale hoar-
frost; the meal lodged in the corners of the window-sills, forming a soil
in which lichens grew without ever getting any bigger, as they had done
since his smallest infancy; the mosses on the plinth towards the river,
reaching as high as the capillary power of the walls would fetch up
moisture for their nourishment, and the penned mill-pond, now as ever on
the point of overflowing into the garden. Everything was the same.

When he had had enough of this it occurred to Loveday that he might get
into the house in spite of the locked doors; and by entering the garden,
placing a pole from the fork of an apple-tree to the window-sill of a
bedroom on that side, and climbing