story," cried Clutterbuck. "It is two years since I was stationed at the Scilly Islands, two years since I dined in the mess-room of Star Castle with Captain Hathaway of his Majesty's Invalids, and was bored to death with his dissertations on Diodorus Siculus. Two years! The boy must have news of consequence. There is no doubt trouble with the cray fish, or Adam Mayle has broken the head of the collector of the Customs House----"

"Adam Mayle is dead. He was struck down by paralysis and never moved till he died," interrupted Dick Parmiter.

The news sobered Clutterbuck for an instant. "Dead!" said he, gaping at the boy. "Dead!" he repeated, and so flung back to his noise and laughter, though there was a ring of savagery in it very strange to his friends. "Well, more brandy will pay revenue, and fewer ships will come ashore, and very like there'll be quiet upon Tresco----"

"No," interrupted Parmiter again, and Clutterbuck turned upon him with a flush of rage.

"Well, tell your story and have done with it!"

"To you," said the boy, looking from one to other of the faces about him.

"No, to all," cried Clutterbuck. The drink, and a certain anger of which we did not know the source, made him obstinate. "You shall tell it to us all, or not at all. Bring that table, forward, Macfarlane! You shall stand on the table Dick, like a preacher in his pulpit," he sneered, "and put all the fine gentlemen to shame, with a story of the rustic virtues."

The table was dragged from the corner into the middle of the room. The boy protested, and made for the door. But he was thrust back, seized and lifted struggling on to the table, where he was set upon his feet.

"Harmony, gentlemen, harmony!" cried Clutterbuck, flapping his hand upon the mantelshelf. "Take your seats, and no whispering in the side boxes, if you please. For I can promise you a play which needs no prologue to excuse it."

It was a company in which a small jest passed easily for a high stroke of wit. They applauded Lieutenant Clutterbuck's sally, and drew up their chairs round the table and sat looking upwards towards the boy, with a great expectation of amusement, just as people watch a bear-baiting at a fair. For my part I had not moved, and it was no doubt for that reason that Parmiter looked for help towards me.

"When all's said, Clutterbuck," I began, "you and your friends are a pack of bullies. The boy's a good boy, devil take me if he isn't."

The boy upon the table looked his gratitude for the small mercy of my ineffectual plea, and I should have proceeded to enlarge upon it had I not noticed a very astonishing thing. For Parmiter lifted his arm high up above his head as though to impress upon me his gratitude, and his arm lengthened out and grew until it touched the ceiling. Then it dwindled and shrank until again it was no more than a boy's arm on a boy's shoulder. I was so struck with this curious phenomenon that I broke off my protest on his behalf, and mentioned to those about me what I had seen, asking whether they had remarked it too, and inquiring to what cause, whither of health or malady, they were disposed to attribute so sudden a growth and contraction.

However, Lieutenant Clutterbuck's guests were only disposed that night to make light of any subject however important or scientific. For some laughed in my face, others more polite, shrugged their shoulders with a smile, and the stranger who had spoken to me before clapped his hand in the small of my back as I leaned forward, and shouted some ill-bred word that, though might he die of small-pox if he had ever met me before, he would have known me from a thousand by the tales he had heard. However, before I could answer him fitly, and indeed, while I was still pondering the meaning of his words. Lieutenant Clutterbuck clapped his hands for silence, and Dick Parmiter, seeing no longer any hope of succour, perforce began to tell his story.

It was a story of a youth that sat in the stocks of a Sunday morning and disappeared thereafter from the islands; of a girl named Helen; of a negro who slept and slept, and of men watching a house with a great tangled garden that stood at the edge of the sea. Cullen Mayle, Parmiter called the youth who had sat in the stocks, son to that Adam whose death had so taken Lieutenant Clutterbuck with surprise. But I could not make head or tail of the business. For one thing I have always been very fond of flowers, and quite unaccountably the polished floor of the room blossomed into a parterre of roses, so that my attention was distracted by this curious and pleasing event.

For another, Parmiter's story was continually interrupted by intricate questions intended to confuse him, his evident anxiety was made the occasion of much amusement by those seated about the table, and he was induced on one excuse and another to go back to the beginning again and again and relate once more what he had already told. But I remember that he spoke with a high intonation, and rather quickly and with a broad accent, and that even then I was extremely sensible of the unfamiliar parts from which he came. His words seemed to have preserved a smell of the sea, and through them I seemed to hear very clearly the sound of waves breaking upon a remote beach--near in a word to that granite house with the tangled garden where the men watched and watched.

Then the boy's story ceased, and the next thing I heard was a sound of sobbing. I looked up, and there was Dick Parmiter upon the table, crying like a child. Over against him sat Lieutenant Clutterbuck, with a face sour and dark.

"I'll not stir a foot or lift a finger," said he, swearing an oath, "no, not if God comes down and bids me."

And upon that the boy weakened of a sudden, swayed for an instant upon his feet, and dropped in a huddle upon the table. His swoon put every one to shame except Clutterbuck; everyone busied himself about the boy, dabbing his forehead with wet handkerchiefs, and spilling brandy over his face in attempts to pour it into his mouth--every one except Clutterbuck, who never moved nor changed in a single line of his face, from his fixed expression of anger. Dick Parmiter recovered from his swoon and sat up: and his first look was towards the lieutenant, whose face softened for an instant with I know not what memories of days under the sun in a fishing boat amongst the islands.

"Dick, you are over-tired. It's a long road from the Scillies to London. Very like, too, you are hungry," and Dick nodded "yes" to each sentence. "Well, Dick, you shall eat here, if there's any food in my larder, and you shall sleep here when you have eaten."

"Is that all?" asked Parmiter, simply, and Clutterbuck's face turned hard again as a stone.

"Every word," said he.

The boy slipped off the table and began to search on the ground. His cap had fallen from his hand when he fell down in his swoon. He picked it up from beneath a chair. He did not look any more at Clutterbuck; he made no appeal to anyone in the room; but though his legs still faltered from weakness, he walked silently out of the door, and in a little we heard his footsteps upon the stone stairs and the banisters creaking, as though he clung to them, while he descended, for support.

"Good God, Clutterbuck!" cried Macfarlane "he's but a boy."

"With no roof to his head," said another.

"And fainting for lack of a meal," said a third.

"He shall have both," I cried, "if he will take them from me," and I ran out of the door.

"Dick," I cried down the hollow of the staircase, "Dick Parmiter," but no answer was returned, save my own cry coming back to me up the