"Nay, Master Gemp, you could always find enough to see and do in the town, eh?" "Plenty! plenty, mun, plenty!--I've got it!" "Eh?" "She's going--Hallam's wife, yonder--to see owd Sir Gordon, and beg Hallam off; and, look here, I wean't hev it!" Gemp banged his stick down upon the counter in a way that made the cloth spread thereon rise in waves, and became very broad of speech here, though it was a matter of pride amongst the Castor people that they spoke the purest English in the county, and were not broad of utterance, like the people on the wolds, and "down in the marsh." VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. A PAINFUL MEETING. Whether Gemp would have it or no, Millicent Hallam was on her way to Sir Gordon's quiet, old-fashioned house on the North Road--a house that was a bit of a mystery to the Castor children, whose young brains were full of conjecture as to what could be inside a place whose windows were blanks, and with nothing but a door to the road, and a high wall right and left to complete the blankness of the frontage. It ought to have been called the backage; for Sir Gordon Bourne's house was very pleasant on the other side, with a compact garden and flowers blooming to brighten it--a garden in which he never walked. Millicent Hallam pulled at the swinging handle of the bell at Sir Gordon's door with the determination of one who has called to demand a right. The door was opened by a quiet-looking, middle-aged man in drab livery, whose brown hair and cocoa-nut fibry whiskers, joined to a swinging, easy gait, suggested that he would not have been out of place on the deck of a vessel, an idea strengthened by an appearance, on one side of his face, as if he were putting his tongue in his cheek. He drew back respectfully before Millicent could say, "Is Sir Gordon at home?" allowed her to pass, and then, as Thisbe followed her mistress, he gave her a very solemn wink, but without the vestige of a smile. Thisbe gave her shawl a violent snatch, as if it were armour that she was drawing over a weak spot; but Tom Porter, Sir Gordon's factotum, did not see it, for he was closing the door and thinking about how to hide the fact that his hands were marked with rouge with which he had been polishing the plate when the bell rang. He led the way across the hall, which was so full of curiosities from all parts of the globe that it resembled a museum, and, opening a door at the end, ushered Millicent into Sir Gordon's library, a neatly kept little room with a good deal of the air of a captain's cabin in its furnishing; telescopes, compasses, and charts hung here and there, in company with books of a maritime character, while one side of the place was taken up by a large glass case containing a model of "The _Sea Dream_ schooner yacht, the property of Gordon Bourne." So read an inscription at the foot, engraved upon a brass plate.