ptain Stillwell to stop the ship
and lower a boat.

"I am going to treat myself to a run ashore," he said by way of
explanation.

The vessel slowly stopped. The covers were whipped off the gig. She was
hoisted out and lowered, the crew dropping down the ladder into their
places at the peep-peep-peep of the whistle.

"I leave the ship," said Sir John, not to convey a fact patently
obvious, but in obedience to a naval formula.

He was landed at a little cove where in bygone days he had often whiled
away an hour waiting in charge of Hadow's boat. It gave him a singular
sensation to feel the keel grate against the shingle, and to find
himself once more setting foot in Lihua. He drew a deep breath as he
looked about and noticed how unchanged it all was. There were some new
houses in new places, and grass on the sites of others that were
endeared to him in recollection; but it was Lihua, after all, the Lihua
of his boyhood, the Lihua of his dreams. For a while he strolled about
at random, walking with the phantoms of the past, hearing their
laughter, seeing their faces, recalling a thousand things he had
forgotten.

It came over him with a start that the village was empty. Then he
remembered it was Sunday, and they were all in church. Thank God, there
was none to watch him; no prying, curious eyes to disturb his thoughts.
But they would soon be out again, and it behooved him to make the best
use of his solitude while he might. He struck inland, his heart beating
with a curious expectancy; at every sound he held his breath, and he
would turn quickly and look back with a haunting sense that Tehea was
near him; that perhaps she was gazing at him through the trees. He
approached his old home through overgrown plantations. It awed him to
part the branches and to feel himself drawing nearer at every step to
the only house he had ever called his own. As he heard the splashing
waterfall he stopped, not daring for the moment to go on. When at last
he did so, and mounted the little hill, he found no house at all;
nothing but ferns and weeds, man-high. He moved about here and there, up
to the armpits in verdure, in a sort of consternation at discovering it
gone.

His foot struck against a boulder.

He had forgotten there were any rocks on the hill. He moved along, and
his foot struck again. He pressed the weeds back and looked down. He saw
a tomb of crumbling cement, green with age and buried out of sight under
the tangle.