started on his long journey nine weeks before.

* * * * *

It is not often--very seldom, indeed--that I am able to tell my readers
'what became of' the children they have come to know, and sometimes, I
hope, to care for in these simple stories. But as it is now many years
ago since the Vane family came to Seacove Rectory, and as Randolph and
his sisters and Celestina Fairchild have long ago been grown-up people,
I can give you another peep of them some eight or ten years after the
birthday I have been telling you about.

The curtain rises again on a different scene.

It is a lovely, old-fashioned garden, exquisitely neat and filled with
plants and flowers, showing at their best in the bright soft light of a
midsummer afternoon. A rectory garden, but not Seacove. Poor Seacove,
with its sandy soil and near neighbourhood to the sea, could not have
produced the velvety grass of that old bowling-green, now (for we are
still speaking of a good many years ago) a croquet-ground, or the
luxuriant 'rose hedge' bordering one end. Two girls were walking slowly
up and down the wide terrace walk in front of the low windows, talking
as they walked. One was tall and slight, with a fair sweet face--a very
lovely face, and one that no one loved and admired more heartily than
did her younger sister.

'Alie dear, I do hope you've had a happy birthday,' said
Bridget--sixteen-years-old Bridget!--for Rosalys was twenty-one to-day.
'There are some birthdays one should remember more than others. A
twenty-first birthday is a _very_ particular one, isn't it?'