old friend, the Marquis de Gemosac."

The two gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Marvin, knowing no French,
proceeded to address the stranger in good British Latin, after the
manner of the courtly divines of his day. Which Latin, from its
mode of pronunciation, was entirely unintelligible to its hearer.

In return, the rector introduced the two strangers to his niece,
Miriam Liston.

"The mainstay of my quiet house," he added, with his vague and
dreamy smile.

"I have already heard of you," said Dormer Colville at once, with
his modest deference, "from my cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence."

He seemed, as sailors say, never to be at a loose end; but to go
through life with a facile readiness, having, as it were, his hands
full of threads among which to select, with a careless affability,
one that must draw him nearer to high and low, men and women, alike.

They talked together for some minutes, and, soon after the discovery
that Miriam Liston was as good a French scholar as himself, and
therefore able to converse with the Marquis de Gemosac, Colville
regretted that it was time for them to return to their simple
evening meal at "The Black Sailor."

"Well," said Colville to Monsieur de Gemosac, as they walked slowly
across the green toward the inn, embowered in its simple cottage-
garden, all ablaze now with hollyhocks and poppies--"well, after