attractive when the light of laughter was in them. Mr. Ellington had
fallen in with a beautiful girl. He did not formulate any opinion on the
subject all at once, but he prolonged the conversation into the second
five minutes. Then he said casually, "I've not seen you passing this way
before," and the dark young lady made answer, with complete simplicity,
"No, but I always come through here on Thursday afternoons as I go to my
aunt's over at the Dean."

Mr. Ellington said "good-bye" at last, and the tall, strong figure of
the girl disappeared round a bluff of the shrubbery, her feet lighting
on the gravel with crisp, decided firmness.

It was not an exciting incident, but in truth the things that alter
lives, and give us our strongest emotions, do really happen in fashions
the reverse of picturesque. A couple of young folk had exchanged a score
or so of vapid words, yet before many weeks had gone several people had
reason for wishing the trivial interview had never been.

The girl thought but once more about the matter. On her way back the
clink of the closing wicket brought young Ellington to her mind again,
and she said to herself, "What a nice free lad the young squire is! They
were saying he was a kind of close fellow with a bad temper. He doesn't
look like that. I wonder what makes him flatten his hair down so funny?
He asked me about next Thursday." And there Miss Mary Casely ceased her
maiden meditations, and walked on with her sharp step, and with a mind
vacant of all coherent thought, as only the truly rustic mind can be.
Presently she passed a row of one-storied cottages which ran along the
edge of the low cliff, and she tapped at the door of a somewhat larger
house which stood in a dignified manner a little apart from the
fishermen's cottages. She heard a strong voice say, "Oh! It's her, back
again." Then a heavy step crunched the sand of the flooring, and made
the windows rattle in their frames. The door opened, and the same deep
voice said, "Ye've getten here then, hinny. What kind of a night is it?"

The man stooped low to escape the lintel, and then straightened himself
up in the road.

If you had searched from Yarmouth to Berwick the whole coast along you
could not have found a more superb creature. He stood six feet four, but
his limbs were so massive, and the outward arch of his broad chest was
so full, that you might easily have guessed his inches wrongly. As he
turned westward toward the last lig