He paid the few coppers for his reckoning, took up his stick and little black bag, and trudged on refreshed, and as he neared Berneval the expectation of Aline's welcome gladdened him. He had rented for the month a cottage with a straggling piece of ground behind, from an artist friend whose possession it was. The friend had fixed the figure absurdly low; the modest living under Aline's experienced management was cheap, and the _bonne à tout faire_ cooked divinely for a few halfpence a day. By a curious coincidence Mr. Anthony Merewether had also pitched upon Berneval as a summer resting-place. He had come on business, he gave out, and every morning saw him issue from the hotel by the beach, armed with easel and camp-stool, and the rest of the landscape-painter's paraphernalia, and every evening saw him smoking cigarettes on Jimmie's veranda. Whether the hours of sunshine saw him consistently hard at work, Jimmie was inclined to doubt. He certainly bathed a great deal and ran about with Aline a great deal, and Jimmie read the pair moral lessons on the evil effects of idleness. But Tony was a fresh-minded boy; his ingenuous conversation provided Jimmie with much entertainment, and his presence on their holiday gave him the satisfaction of feeling that Aline had some one of her own age to play with. The ramshackle vehicle, half diligence, half omnibus, that plies between Berneval and Dieppe, passed him with great cracking of whip and straining of rusty harness and loud _hue_'s from the driver, just as he entered the village. It was late afternoon, and the trim white and green of the place was bathed in mellow sunshine. The short cut home lay up a lane and through the churchyard, a cluster of grey slabs around a little grey church; and many of the slabs bore the story of the pitiless sea--how Jean-Marie Dulac, many years ago, was drowned at the age of nineteen, and how Jacques Lemerre perished in a storm; for it has been from time immemorial a tiny village of fisher-folk and every family has given of its own to the waves. The pathos of the simple legends on the stones always touched him as he walked by; and now he paused to decipher some moss-grown letters of fifty years ago. He stooped, made out the same sad tale, moralised a little thereon, and rose with a sigh of relief to greet the sunshine and the fair earth. But the sight that suddenly met his eyes banished dead fishermen and hungry sea and sunny tree-tops from his mind. It was a boy and a girl very close together, his arm about her waist, her head upon his shoulder, walking by the little church. Their backs were towards him. He stared open-mouthed. “God bless my soul!” said he, in amazement. Then he dropped his stick, which clattered upon a gravestone.