“Mr. Robert Lovyes?” I asked.

“Yes, I am he.”  And he led the way into a kitchen, poor and mean as the outside warranted, but scrupulously clean and bright with a fire.  He led the way, as I say, and I was still more mystified to observe from his gait, his height, and the stoop of his shoulders that he was the man whom I had seen carrying the basket through the garden.  I had now an opportunity of noticing his face, wherein I could detect no resemblance to his brother’s.  For it was broader and more vigorous, with a great, white beard valancing it; and whereas Mr. John’s hair was neatly powdered and tied with a ribbon, as a gentleman’s should be, Mr. Robert’s, which was of a black colour with a little sprinkling of grey, hung about his head in a tangled mane.  There was but a two-years difference between the ages of the brothers, but there might have been a decade.  I explained my business, and we sat down to a supper of fish, freshly caught, which he served himself.  And during supper he gave me the information I was come after.  But I lent only an inattentive ear to his talk.  For my knowledge of his wealth, the picture of him as he sat in his great sea-boots and coarse seaman’s vest, as though it was the most natural garb in the world, and his easy discourse about those far African rivers, made a veritable jumble of my mind.  To add to it all, there was the mystery of the shuttered house.  More than once I was inclined to question him upon this last account, but his manner did not promise confidences, and I said nothing.  At last he perceived my inattention.

“I will repeat all this to-morrow,” he said grimly.  “You are, no doubt, tired.  I cannot, I am afraid, house you, for, as you see, I have no room; but I have a young friend who happens by good luck to stay this night on Tresco, and no doubt he will oblige me.”  Thereupon he led me to a cottage on the outskirts of Dolphin Town, and of all in that village nearest to the sea.

“My friend,” said he, “is named Ginver Wyeth, and, though he comes from these parts, he does not live here, being a school-master on the mainland.  His mother has died lately, and he is come on that account.”

Mr. Wyeth received me hospitably, but with a certain pedantry of speech which somewhat surprised me, seeing that his parents were common fisherfolk.  He readily explained the matter, however, over a pipe, when Mr. Lovyes had left us.  “I owe everything to Mrs. Lovyes,” he said.  “She took me when a boy, taught me something herself, and sent me thereafter, at her own charges, to a school in Falmouth.”

“Mrs. Lovyes!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” he continued, and, bending forward, lowered his voice.  “You went up to Merchant’s Point, you say?  Then you passed Crudge’s Folly—­a house of two storeys with a well in the garden.”

“Yes, yes!” I said.

“She lives there,” said he.

“Behind those shutters!” I cried.

“For twenty years she has lived in the midst of us, and no one has seen her during all that time.  Not even Robert Lovyes.  Aye, she has lived behind the shutters.”