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168 ishingly apt. His personality has puzzled me extremely, I confess. He keeps entirely alone, and has something almost fanatical about him that is beyond my comprehension."

"Very interesting," said the greater prelate, nodding his gray head benignly. "One sees hermits nowadays, to be sure, and I presume that they all have their stories. Edwin and Angelina, perhaps?" He smiled gently, as at a drollery, and added, "It is doubtless he whom I have observed on the beach digging—quite like a picture of Millet's. … He has a good face."

"He seems to feel it his duty to stay here, I think," said the other, and they passed on to talk of golf.

That very afternoon duty was to put on toward Marden a newer and a sterner face. He had no presentiment while he walked through the street toward the setting sun, and through the fields already yellow with the autumn. He even felt a deep content when he mounted the knoll and stopped, as he often did, to look at the house standing there gray and silent, with the woodbine leaves