‘It is very kind, but we won’t inconvenience him in that way,’ said the Marchmills.

‘O, it won’t inconvenience him, I assure you!’ said the landlady eloquently.  ’You see, he’s a different sort of young man from most—­dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy—­and he cares more to be here when the south-westerly gales are beating against the door, and the sea washes over the Parade, and there’s not a soul in the place, than he does now in the season.  He’d just as soon be where, in fact, he’s going temporarily, to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.’  She hoped therefore that they would come.

The Marchmill family accordingly took possession of the house next day, and it seemed to suit them very well.  After luncheon Mr. Marchmill strolled out towards the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having despatched the children to their outdoor amusements on the sands, settled herself in more completely, examining this and that article, and testing the reflecting powers of the mirror in the wardrobe door.

In the small back sitting-room, which had been the young bachelor’s, she found furniture of a more personal nature than in the rest.  Shabby books, of correct rather than rare editions, were piled up in a queerly reserved manner in corners, as if the previous occupant had not conceived the possibility that any incoming person of the season’s bringing could care to look inside them.  The landlady hovered on the threshold to rectify anything that Mrs. Marchmill might not find to her satisfaction.

‘I’ll make this my own little room,’ said the latter, ’because the books are here.  By the way, the person who has left seems to have a good many.  He won’t mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?’

’O dear no, ma’am.  Yes, he has a good many.  You see, he is in the literary line himself somewhat.  He is a poet—­yes, really a poet—­and he has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on, but not enough for cutting a figure, even if he cared to.’

‘A poet!  O, I did not know that.’

Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner’s name written on the title-page.  ‘Dear me!’ she continued; ’I know his name very well—­Robert Trewe—­of course I do; and his writings!  And it is his rooms we have taken, and him we have turned out of his home?’

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with interested surprise of Robert Trewe.  Her own latter history will best explain that interest.  Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.  These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared in various