Once they were past the turn, Bob let the horse slip into a walk, and moved in his seat with something like relief. Now they were out of reach of the following eyes, and especially of Marget’s terrible eyes. Even they, piercing as they were, could not bore through stone and rising earth. The remains of his youth awoke at this touch of adventure and escape, and he looked about him from side to side, and whistled as if compelled by the rhythm of the hoofs. The old man stirred, too, and looked about, and suddenly, with a half-mechanical lifting of the hand, he began to eat his buttered scone. He forgot it again, however, after a couple of bites, because his memories crowded in too fast. [Illustration: “Houses never outstared you on the marsh”] [Illustration: “Shore-grasses never really still”] They came to the twilight spot on the river bank where he had played until Marget found him out, but he barely looked at it as he drove past. He was a different person to-day from the shabby fiddler who had played through stolen hours to an idle ring. A charm had begun to work after he reached the turn, so that he was no longer the down-trodden creature rated by a shrew. Now he was just the simple old man who had lived at the sea’s edge with a fiddle under his arm. Marget’s voice was no longer in his ears, but the voice of the peewit and gull and the rush of the incoming tide. And Bob, too, was changed from a dull epitome of mistakes to a soul who remembered the pride and spring of life. If Kit had turned to look at him just then, he would have seen him a moment in his splendid youth, with the wrestler’s steady eye and muscular grace. He remembered him conqueror in many a ring, and wondered what had become of his cups and belts. They were not at the cottage, he felt sure of that. Marget would have been sure to say they were “in the road,” and at least he would have seen the children using them in their play. Bob’s exploits were never mentioned in that house, because Marget was of opinion that wrestling was low. Probably the trophies had gone long since to provide other things more necessary if less proud. But in the old days there had been a grand show of them on the dresser at the farm, polished glories that, when the dusk came, made silver points of light both above and within the oak.