The ‘most likely’ came true.  One month saw Mr. and Mrs. Vane safe back at Seacove; ‘papa’ so bright and well, so bronzed and ruddy too, that it was difficult to believe he was the same feeble-looking invalid who had started on his long journey nine weeks before.

* * * * *

It is not often—­very seldom, indeed—­that I am able to tell my readers ‘what became of’ the children they have come to know, and sometimes, I hope, to care for in these simple stories.  But as it is now many years ago since the Vane family came to Seacove Rectory, and as Randolph and his sisters and Celestina Fairchild have long ago been grown-up people, I can give you another peep of them some eight or ten years after the birthday I have been telling you about.

The curtain rises again on a different scene.

It is a lovely, old-fashioned garden, exquisitely neat and filled with plants and flowers, showing at their best in the bright soft light of a midsummer afternoon.  A rectory garden, but not Seacove.  Poor Seacove, with its sandy soil and near neighbourhood to the sea, could not have produced the velvety grass of that old bowling-green, now (for we are still speaking of a good many years ago) a croquet-ground, or the luxuriant ‘rose hedge’ bordering one end.  Two girls were walking slowly up and down the wide terrace walk in front of the low windows, talking as they walked.  One was tall and slight, with a fair sweet face—­a very lovely face, and one that no one loved and admired more heartily than did her younger sister.

‘Alie dear, I do hope you’ve had a happy birthday,’ said Bridget—­sixteen-years-old Bridget!—­for Rosalys was twenty-one to-day.  ’There are some birthdays one should remember more than others.  A twenty-first birthday is a very particular one, isn’t it?’

‘Yes indeed, Biddy, it is,’ Alie replied.  ’I can scarcely believe it.  And fancy, in five years more you will be twenty-one!’

‘I hope I shall go on growing till then,’ said Biddy, whose great ambition was to be as tall as her sister.  ’Some girls do, don’t they?  And I have grown a good deal this year.  I don’t look as stumpy as I did, do I?’ and Biddy looked up in her sister’s face with a pleasant smile—­a smile that showed her pretty white teeth and shone out of her nice brown eyes.  She was not lovely like Alie, but she had a dear honest face—­though she was still rather freckled, and her dark wavy hair gave her a somewhat gipsy look.

‘You aren’t a bit stumpy—­you’re just nice,’ said Rosalys, ’though I daresay you will grow some more.  Just think what a little roundabout you once were, and how you’ve grown since then.’

‘Yes indeed,’ laughed Biddy.  ’Talking of birthdays, Alie, do you remember my eighth birthday?  The one at Seacove, when papa and mamma were away after his being so ill, and when you all gave me the doll-house—­the dear old doll-house; do you know I really sometimes play with it still?  I often think of Seacove.’