Then he had risen up quickly, and said, "Well, you know all now. We will talk of something else." But she only shook her head and moved away, and, as we have seen, went to bed. The next morning they met calmly enough. On his side it was done with an effort; on hers without effort, yet with a little trembling fear, which went when she saw his calm, and she poured out tea, and he drank it, and only a rather extraordinary silence told of too much having being said the night before. Now, why was all this? Why were this man and this young English girl travelling thus to the sweet south coast, and to expecting friends? While they are travelling on their way, we, you and I, dear reader, will not only get on before them, but also turn back the pages of life's story, and read its secrets. They were going to a great house in a fine park, where fern waved its tall, mounted feathers of green, and hid the dappled deer from sight-- where great ancestral oaks spread protecting branches; where hawthorn trees, that it had taken three generations of men to make, stood, large, thick, knotted, twisted--strange, dark, stunted looking trees they looked, till spring came, and no green was like their green, and the glory of their flower-wreaths people made pilgrimages to see. The place was called Beremouth. A mile and a half off was a town; one of those odd little old places which tell of days and fashions past away. A very respectable place. There had lived in Marston the dowager ladies of old country families, in houses which had no pretensions to grandeur as you passed them in the extremely quiet street, but which on the other side broke out into bay windows, garden fronts, charming conservatories, and a good many other things which help to make life pleasant. So the inhabitants of Marston were not all mere country-town's people. They knew themselves to be _somebodies_ and they never forgot it. Now, in this town dwelt a certain widow lady; poor she was, but she had a pedigree and two beautiful daughters. Mary and Lucia Morier were not two commonly, or even uncommonly, pretty girls; they were wonderfully beautiful, people said, and nothing less. So lovers came a courting. One married a Scotchman, a Mr. Erskine. They liked each other quite well enough, Lucia thought, when she made her promises, and received his; and so they did. They lived happily; did good; wished for children but never had any, and so adopted Mr. Erskine's orphan nephew--namely, the very man who behaved with such strange imprudence in the inn at Hull. Mr. Erskine the uncle was twenty years older than Mrs. Erskine the aunt. Mr. Erskine the younger was but a child when they adopted him. But he was their heir, as well as the inheritor of his father's' fortune, and they loved and cared for him.