They sat in silence watching the shadowy figure on the dyke, outlined dimly against the hazy horizon. He was walking, still with haste as if to a certain destination, toward the rectory buried in its half circle of crouching trees. And already another shadow was hurrying from the house to meet him. It was the boy, little Sep Marvin, and in the stillness of the evening his shrill voice could be heard in excited greeting. "What have you brought? What have you brought?" he was crying, as he ran toward Barebone. They seemed to have so much to say to each other that they could not wait until they came within speaking distance. The boy took Barebone's hand, and turning walked back with him to the old house peeping over the dyke toward the sea. He could scarcely walk quietly, for joy at the return of his friend, and skipped from side to side, pouring out questions and answering them himself as children and women do. But Barebone gave him only half of his attention and looked before him with grave eyes, while the boy talked of nests and knives. Barebone was looking toward the garden, concealed like an entrenchment behind the dyke. It was a quiet evening, and the rector was walking slowly backward and forward on the raised path, made on the dyke itself, like a ship-captain on his quarter-deck, with hands clasped behind his bent back and eyes that swept the horizon at each turn with a mechanical monotony. At one end of the path, which was worn smooth by the Reverend Septimus Marvin's pensive foot, the gleam of a white dress betrayed the presence of his niece, Miriam Liston. "Ah, is that you?" asked the rector, holding out a limp hand. "Yes. I remember Sep was allowed to sit up till half-past eight in the hope that you might come round to see us. Well, Loo, and how are you? Yes--yes." And he looked vaguely out to sea, repeating below his breath the words "Yes--yes" almost in a whisper, as if communing secretly with his own thoughts out of hearing of the world. "Of course I should come round to see you," answered Barebone. "Where else should I go? So soon as we had had tea and I could change my clothes and get away from that dear Mrs. Clubbe. It seems so strange to come back here from the racketing world--and France is a racketing world of its own--and find everything in Farlingford just the same." He had shaken hands with the rector and with Miriam Liston as he spoke, and his speech was not the speech of Farlingford men at all, but rather of Septimus Marvin himself, of whose voice he had acquired the ring of education, while adding to it a neatness and quickness of enunciation which must have been his own; for none in Suffolk could have taught it to him. "Just the same," he repeated, glancing at the book Miriam had laid aside for a moment to greet him and had now taken up again. "That book must be very large print," he said, "for you to be able to read by this light."