“Nicholls,” Tavernake said, “you don’t remember me, do you?”

The boat-builder shook his head slowly and ponderously.

“There was Richard Tavernake who farmed the low fields,” he remarked, reminiscently.  “Maybe you’re a son of his.  Now I come to think of it, he had a boy apprenticed to the carpentering.”

“I was the boy,” Tavernake answered.  “I soon had enough of it and went to London.”

“You’m grown out of all knowledge,” Nicholls declared, “but I mind you now.  So you’ve been in London all these years?”

“I’ve been in London,” Tavernake admitted, “and I think, of the two, that Sprey-by-the-Sea is the better place.”

“Sprey is well enough,” the boat-builder confessed, “well enough for a man who isn’t set on change.”

“Change,” Tavernake asserted, grimly, “is an overrated joy.  I have had too much of it in my life.  I think that I should like to stay here for some time.”

The boat-builder was surprised, but he was a man of heavy and deliberate turn of mind and he did not commit himself to speech.  Tavernake continued.

“I used to know something of carpentering in my younger days,” he said, “and I don’t think that I have forgotten it all.  I wonder if I could find anything to do down here?”

Matthew Nicholls stroked his beard thoughtfully.

“The folk round about are not over partial to strangers,” he observed, “and you’m been away so long I reckon there’s not many as’d recollect you.  And as for carpentering jobs, there’s Tom Lake over at Lesser Blakeney and his brother down at Brancaster, besides me on the spot, as you might say.  It’s a poor sort of opening there’d be, if you ask my opinion, especially for one like yourself, as ’as got education.”

“I should be satisfied with very little,” Tavernake persisted.  “I want to work with my hands.  I should like to forget for a time that I have had any education at all.”

“That do seem mightily queer to me,” Nicholls remarked, thoughtfully.

Tavernake smiled.

“Come,” he said, “it isn’t altogether unnatural.  I want to make something with my hands.  I think that I could build boats.  Why do you not take me into your yard?  I could do no harm and I should not want much pay.”

Matthew Nicholls stroked his beard once more and this time he counted fifty, as was his custom when confronted with a difficult matter.  He had no need to do anything of the sort, for nothing in the world would have induced him to make up his mind on the spot as to so weighty a proposal.

“It’s not likely that you’re serious,” he objected.  “You are a young man and strong-limbed, I should imagine, but you’ve education—­one can tell it by the way you pronounce your words.  It’s but a poor living, after all, to be made here.”

“I like the place,” Tavernake declared doggedly.  “I am a man of small needs.  I want to work all through the day, work till I am tired enough to sleep at night, work till my bones ache and my arms are sore.  I suppose you could give me enough to live on in a humble way?”