"If I'd kept a lookout ahead, I could have steered the good lady clear of any fret about me and my eyesight. And if we'd only 'a known, I might 'a told her the starry o' the Flying Dutchman--just for entertainment like! A yarn's a yarn, master!" * * * * * Athelstan Taylor was puzzled on his way home by the curious selection of a restless conscience as aliment for disquiet. But thinking back on his own past, he found that _his_ disquiets had not been about his mistakes that had most harmed others. Could he not remember his own prolonged remorse, at five years old, when an overtwist brought off the wooden leg of a minute doll, and he had the meanness to put the limb in place, and leave it, sound to all seeming, for its owner to discover its calamity? And how he _never told_! Even now, he wished he had confessed. It was no use now! The sister that doll had belonged to had been dead thirty years, and this tale he had just heard was, so he gathered, well within the last twenty. He was wondering that evening, after writing to Gus, whether his friend, whose place he was so glad to occupy, would not have raised some technical difficulty about the Administration of the Sacrament in rubber gloves, when a note came from his friend the House Surgeon. Had the man he had talked with given his name? It appeared that the name entered in the list of patients was an alias. Probably he had several aliases. But he had a right to be buried and registered under his last one. A line by return would do. The letter made very light of the matter--said the deceased couldn't have had any property! Athelstan Taylor's reply was that the name given, as far as he could hear it, was Edward Kay Thorne. He walked out and posted it himself, as the servants had gone to bed. He posted at the same time his letter to his friend Gus, to which he had added a long postscript about the events of the day. "You need not think," it ended, "that I have broken the 'seal of the confessional' in telling this man's story. He said I was at liberty to do as I liked." He felt rather glad to have a sharer in such a confidence. Then he went back to his comfortable library, put coals on the fire, and sat up till one in the morning reading. CHAPTER XVIII THAT NASTY LITTLE STETHOSCOPE! A RETROSPECT ABOUT THE RECTOR AND MISS FOSSETT. A TRANSACTION IN KISSES. AUNT STINGY'S WEEDS, AND WHAT A GOOD COOK SHE WAS