So deeply preoccupied was he that, coming to a bend where the coombe suddenly widened, and the stream without warning cast its green fringe of alders like a slough and slipped down a beach of flat pebbles to the head waters of a tidal creek, Mr. Molesworth rubbed his eyes with a start. Had the stream been a Naiad she could not have given him the go-by more coquettishly. He rubbed his eyes, and then with a short gasp of wonder--almost of terror--involuntarily looked around for Sir John. Here before him was a shore, with a church beside it, and at the far end a whitewashed cottage-- surely the very shore, church, cottage, of Sir John's dream! Yes, there was the stone cross before the porch; and here the grid-fashioned church stile; and yonder under the string-course the scaffold-hole with the grass growing out of it! If Mr. Molesworth's hands had been steady when he tied on his May-fly, they trembled enough now as he hurriedly put up his tackle and disjointed his rod: and still, and again while he hastened across to the cottage above the rocky spit--the cottage with the larch plantation above and in the garden a laburnum aslant and in bloom--his eyes sought the beach for Sir John. The cottage was a large one, as Sir John had described. It was, in fact, a waterside inn, with its name, The Saracen's Head, painted in black letters along its whitewashed front and under a swinging signboard. Looking up at the board Mr. Molesworth discerned, beneath its dark varnish, the shoulders, scimitar, and grinning face of a turbaned Saracen, and laughed aloud between incredulity and a sense of terror absurdly relieved. This, then, was Sir John's black man! But almost at the same moment another face looked over the low hedge--the face of a young girl in a blue sun-bonnet: and Mr. Molesworth put out a hand to the gate to steady himself. The girl--she had heard his laugh, perhaps--gazed down at him with a frank curiosity. Her eyes were honest, clear, untroubled: they were also extremely beautiful eyes: and they were more. As Mr. Molesworth to his last day was prepared to take oath, here were the very eyes, as here was the very face and here the very form, of the Margaret whom he had suffered for, and suffered to be lost to him, twenty-five years ago. It was Margaret, and she had not aged one day. In Margaret's voice, too, seeing that he made no motion to enter, she spoke down to him across the hedge. "Are you a friend, sir, of the gentleman that was here just now?" "Sir John Crang?" Mr. Molesworth just managed to command his voice. "I don't know his name, sir. But he left his cigar-case behind. I found it on the settle five minutes after he had gone, and ran out to search for him. . . ." Mr. Molesworth opened the gate and held out a hand for the case. Yes: he recognised it. It bore Sir John's monogram in silver.