’On the other side of the promontory.  Don’t you remember the spire rising among the trees, as we see it from the water?’

’That church must be worth seeing.  I declare I’ll go there next Sunday.’

Another silence, and Louis said—­’I am curious to know whether you saw her.’

’She was getting into the carriage as I turned the corner; so I went back and asked Bull who they were.’

‘I hope she was the greengrocer’s third cousin.’

‘Pshaw!  I tell you it was Mrs. Mansell and her visitors.’

’Oho!  No wonder Beauchastel architecture is so grand.  What an impudent fellow you are, Jem!’

‘The odd thing is,’ said James, a little ashamed of Louis having put Mansell and Beauchastel together, as he had not intended, ’that it seems they asked Bull who we were.  I thought one old lady was staring hard at you, as if she meant to claim acquaintance, but you shot out of the shop like a sky-rocket.’

’Luckily there’s no danger of that.  No one will come to molest us here.’

‘Depend on it, they are meditating a descent on his lordship.’

‘You shall appear in my name, then.’

’Too like a bad novel:  besides, you don’t look respectable enough for my tutor.  And, now I think of it, no doubt she was asking Bull how he came to let such a disreputable old shooting-jacket into his shop.’

The young men worked up an absurd romance between them, as merrily they crossed the estuary, and rowed up a narrow creek, with a whitewashed village on one side, and on the other a solitary house, the garden sloping to the water, and very nautical—­the vane, a union-jack waved by a brilliant little sailor on the top of a mast, and the arbour, half a boat set on end; whence, as James steered up to the stone steps that were one by one appearing, there emerged an old, grizzly, weather-beaten sailor, who took his pipe from his mouth, and caught hold of the boat.

‘Thank you, Captain!’ cried Fitzjocelyn.  ’I’ve brought home the boat safe, you see, by my own superhuman exertions—­no thanks to Mr. Frost, there!’

‘That’s his way, Captain,’ retorted Jem, leaping out, and helping his cousin:  ’you may thank me for getting him home at all!  But for me, he would have his back against the counter, and his head in a book, this very moment.’

‘Ask him what he was after,’ returned Louis.

‘Which of us d’ye think most likely to lag, Captain Hannaford?’ cried Jem, preventing the question.

‘Which would you choose to have on board?’

‘Ye’d both of ye make more mischief than work,’ said the old seaman, who had been looking from one to the other of the young men, as if they were performing a comedy for his special diversion.

‘So you would not enter us on board the Eliza Priscilla?’ cried Louis.

‘No, no,’ said the old man, shrewdly, and with an air of holding something back; whereupon they both pressed him, and obtained for answer, ’No, no, I wouldn’t sail with you’—­signing towards Fitzjocelyn—­’in my crew:  ye’d be more trouble than ye’re worth.  And as to you, sir, if I wouldn’t sail with ye, I’d like still less to sail under you.’