Miriam's manner toward him was the same as it had always been so long as he could remember. He had once thought--indeed, he had made to her the accusation--that she was always conscious of the social gulf existing between them; that she always remembered that she was by birth and breeding a lady, whereas he was the son of an obscure Frenchman who was nothing but a clockmaker whose name could be read (and can to this day be deciphered) on a hundred timepieces in remote East Anglian farms. Since his change of fortune he had, as all men who rise to a great height or sink to the depths will tell, noted a corresponding change in his friends. Even Captain Clubbe had altered, and the affection which peeped out at times almost against his puritanical will seemed to have suffered a chill. The men of Farlingford, and even those who had sailed in "The Last Hope" with him, seemed to hold him at a distance. They nodded to him with a brief, friendly smile, but were shy of shaking hands. The hand which they would have held out readily enough, had he needed assistance in misfortune, slunk hastily into a pocket. For he who climbs will lose more friends than the ne'er-do-well. Some may account this to human nature for righteousness and others quite the contrary: for jealousy, like love, lies hidden in unsuspected corners. Juliette do Gemosac had been quite different to Loo since learning his story. Miriam alone remained unchanged. He had accused her of failing to rise superior to arbitrary social distinctions, and now, standing behind her in the fire-lit dining-room of the rectory, he retracted that accusation once and for all time in his own heart, though her justification came from a contrary direction to that from which it might have been expected. Miriam alone remained a friend--and nothing else, he added, bitterly, in his own heart. And she seemed to assume that their friendship, begun in face of social distinctions, should never have to suffer from that burthen. "I should like to hear," she repeated, seeing that he was silent, "all that has happened since you went away; all that you may care to tell me." "My heritage, you mean?" She moved in her seat but did not look round. She had laid aside her hat on coming into the house, and as she sat, leaning forward with her hands clasped together in her lap, gazing thoughtfully at the fire which glowed blue and white for the salt water that was in the drift-wood, her hair, loosened by the wind, half concealed her face. "Yes," she answered, slowly. "Do you know what it is--my heritage?" lapsing, as he often did when hurried by some pressing thought, into a colloquialism half French. She shook her head, but made no audible reply. "Do you suspect what it is?" he insisted. "I may have suspected, perhaps," she admitted, after a pause. "When? How long?"