heard the rustling of a woman’s dress.  I held my breath to hear the more surely.  The sound was repeated, but more faintly, and it was followed by a noise like the closing of a door.  I drew back from the house, keeping an eye upon the upper storey, for I thought it possible the woman might reconnoitre me thence.  But the windows stared at me blind, unresponsive.  To the right and left lights twinkled in the scattered dwellings, and I found something very ghostly in the thought of this woman entombed as it were in the midst of them and moving alone in the shuttered gloom.  The twilight deepened, and suddenly the gate behind me whined on its hinges.  At once I dropped to my full length on the grass—­the gloom was now so thick there was little fear I should be discovered—­and a man went past me to the house.  He walked, so far as I could judge, with a heavy stoop, but was yet uncommon tall, and he carried a basket upon his arm.  He laid the basket upon the doorstep, and, to my utter disappointment, turned at once, and so down the path and out at the gate.  I heard the gate rattle once, twice, and then a click as its latch caught.  I was sufficiently curious to desire a nearer view of the basket, and discovered that it contained food.  Then, remembering me that all this while my own business waited, I continued on my way to Mr. Lovyes’ house.  It was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant’s Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour.  Mr. Lovyes was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his dining-room—­a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline.  I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got far before he interrupted me.

“There is a mistake,” he said.  “It is doubtless my brother Robert you are in search of.  I am John Lovyes, and was, it is true, captured with my brother in Africa, but I escaped six years before he did, and traded no more in those parts.  We fled together from the negroes, but we were pursued.  My brother was pierced by an arrow, and I left him, believing him to be dead.”

I had, indeed, heard something of a brother, though I little expected to find him in Tresco too.  He pressed upon me the hospitality of his house, but my business was with Mr. Robert, and I asked him to direct me on my path, which he did with some hesitation and reluctance.  I had once more to pass through Dolphin Town, and an impulse prompted me to take another look at the shuttered house.  I found that the basket of food had been removed, and an empty bucket stood in its place.  But there was still no light visible, and I went on to the dwelling of Mr. Robert Lovyes.  When I came to it, I comprehended his brother’s hesitation.  It was a rough, mean little cottage standing on the edge of the bracken close to the sea—­a dwelling fit for the poorest fisherman, but for no one above that station, and a large open boat was drawn up on the hard beside it as though the tenant fished for his bread.  I knocked at the door, and a man with a candle in his hand opened it.