On leaving the hotel Mr. Kirke set his face westward, and walked inland along the highroad as fast as the darkness would let him.

“Bygrave?” he thought to himself.  “Now I know her name, how much am I the wiser for it!  If it had been Vanstone, my father’s son might have had a chance of making acquaintance with her.”  He stopped, and looked back in the direction of Aldborough.  “What a fool I am!” he burst out suddenly, striking his stick on the ground.  “I was forty last birthday.”  He turned and went on again faster than ever—­his head down; his resolute black eyes searching the darkness on the land as they had searched it many a time on the sea from the deck of his ship.

After more than an hour’s walking he reached a village, with a primitive little church and parsonage nestled together in a hollow.  He entered the house by the back way, and found his sister, the clergyman’s wife, sitting alone over her work in the parlor.

“Where is your husband, Lizzie?” he asked, taking a chair in a corner.

“William has gone out to see a sick person.  He had just time enough before he went,” she added, with a smile, “to tell me about the young lady; and he declares he will never trust himself at Aldborough with you again until you are a steady, married man.”  She stopped, and looked at her brother more attentively than she had looked at him yet.  “Robert!” she said, laying aside her work, and suddenly crossing the room to him.  “You look anxious, you look distressed.  William only laughed about your meeting with the young lady.  Is it serious?  Tell me; what is she like?”

He turned his head away at the question.

She took a stool at his feet, and persisted in looking up at him.  “Is it serious, Robert?” she repeated, softly.

Kirke’s weather-beaten face was accustomed to no concealments—­it answered for him before he spoke a word.  “Don’t tell your husband till I am gone,” he said, with a roughness quite new in his sister’s experience of him.  “I know I only deserve to be laughed at; but it hurts me, for all that.”

“Hurts you?” she repeated, in astonishment.

“You can’t think me half such a fool, Lizzie, as I think myself,” pursued Kirke, bitterly.  “A man at my age ought to know better.  I didn’t set eyes on her for as much as a minute altogether; and there I have been hanging about the place till after nightfall on the chance of seeing her again—­skulking, I should have called it, if I had found one of my men doing what I have been doing myself.  I believe I’m bewitched.  She’s a mere girl, Lizzie—­I doubt if she’s out of her teens—­I’m old enough to be her father.  It’s all one; she stops in my mind in spite of me.  I’ve had her face looking at me, through the pitch darkness, every step of the way to this house; and it’s looking at me now—­as plain as I see yours, and plainer.”