And now I found that I wanted very much to see my friend Dr Duncan. He received me with his stately cordiality, and a smile that went farther than all his words of greeting. “Come now, Mr Walton, I am just going to sit down to my dinner, and you must join me. I think there will be enough for us both. There is, I believe, a chicken a-piece for us, and we can make up with cheese and a glass of—would you believe it?—my own father’s port. He was fond of port—the old man—though I never saw him with one glass more aboard than the registered tonnage. He always sat light on the water. Ah, dear me! I’m old myself now.” “But what am I to do with Mrs Pearson?” I said. “There’s some chef-d’oeuvre of hers waiting for me by this time. She always treats me particularly well on Saturdays and Sundays.” “Ah! then, you must not stop with me. You will fare better at home.” “But I should much prefer stopping with you. Couldn’t you send a message for me?” “To be sure. My boy will run with it at once.” Now, what is the use of writing all this? I do not know. Only that even a tete-a-tete dinner with an old friend, now that I am an old man myself, has such a pearly halo about it in the mists of the past, that every little circumstance connected with it becomes interesting, though it may be quite unworthy of record. So, kind reader, let it stand. We sat down to our dinner, so simple and so well-cooked that it was just what I liked. I wanted very much to tell my friend what had occurred in Catherine’s shop, but I would not begin till we were safe from interruption; and so we chatted away concerning many things, he telling me about his seafaring life, and I telling him some of the few remarkable things that had happened to me in the course of my life-voyage. There is no man but has met with some remarkable things that other people would like to know, and which would seem stranger to them than they did at the time to the person to whom they happened. At length I brought our conversation round to my interview with Catherine Weir. “Can you understand,” I said, “a woman finding it so hard to forgive her own father?” “Are you sure it is her father?” he returned. “Surely she has not this feeling towards more than one. That she has it towards her father, I know.”