kford as far back as tradition preserves the record of
his family.

A friendship had sprung up between Richard and one William Durgin,
a school-mate. This Durgin was a sallow, brooding boy, a year older
than himself. The two lads were antipodal in disposition,
intelligence, and social standing; for though Richard went poorly
clad, the reflection of his cousin's wealth gilded him. Durgin was
the son of a washerwoman. An intimacy between the two would perhaps
have been unlikely but for one fact: it was Durgin's mother who had
given little Dick a shelter at the period of his parents' death.
Though the circumstance did not lie within the pale of Richard's
personal memory, he acknowledged the debt by rather insisting on
Durgin's friendship. It was William Durgin, therefore, who was
elected to wait upon Mr. Shackford on a certain morning which found
that gentleman greatly disturbed by an unprecedented
occurrence,--Richard had slept out of the house the previous night.

Durgin was the bearer of a note which Mr. Shackford received in
some astonishment, and read deliberately, blinking with weak eyes
behind the glasses. Having torn off the blank page and laid it aside
for his own more economical correspondence (the rascal had actually
used a whole sheet to write ten words!), Mr. Shackford turned, and
with the absorbed air of a naturalist studying some abnormal bug
gazed over the steel bow of his spectacles at Durgin.

"Skit!"

Durgin hastily retreated.

"There's a poor lawyer saved," muttered the old man, taking down
his overcoat from a peg behind the door, and snapping off a shred of
lint on the collar with his lean forefinger. Then his face relaxed,
and an odd grin diffused a kind of wintry glow over it.

Richard had run away to sea.

VI

After a lapse of four years, during which he had as completely
vanished out of the memory of Stillwater as if he had been lying all
the while in the crowded family tomb behind the South Church, Richard
Shackford reappeared one summer morning at the door of his cousin's
house in Welch's Court. Mr. Shackford was absent at the moment, and
Mrs. Morganson, an elderly deaf woman, who came in for a few hours
every day to do the house-work, was busy in the extension. Without
announcing himself, Richard stalked up-stairs to the chamber in the
gable, and went directly to a little shelf in one corner, upon which
lay the dog's-eared copy of Robinson Crusoe just as he had left it,
save