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 before I wondered if he hadn't been here before."

"Interesting—very!" said Mr. Pawle. "Now, why, ma'am did you wonder that?"

"Well, sir," replied Mrs. Summers, "because, after he'd looked round the house, and seen his room upstairs, he went out to the front door, and then I followed him, to ask if he had any particular wishes about his dinner that evening. Our front door, as you will see in the morning, fronts the market square, and from it you can see about all there is to see of the town. He was standing at the door, under the porch, looking all round him, and I overheard him talking to himself as I went up behind him.

"'Aye!' he was saying, as he looked this way and that, 'there's the old church, and the old moot-hall, and the old market-place, and the old gabled and thatched houses, and even the old town pump—they haven't changed a bit, I reckon, in all these years!' Then he caught sight of me, and he smiled. 'Not many changes in this old place, landlady, in your time?' he said pleasantly. 'No, sir,' I answered. 'We don't change much in even a hundred years in Marketstoke.' 'No!' he said, and shook his head. 'No—the change is in men, in men!' And then he suddenly set straight off across the square to the churchyard. 'You've known Marketstoke before,' I said to myself."

"You didn't ask him that?" inquired Mr. Pawle, eagerly.

"I didn't, sir," replied Mrs. Summers. "I never asked him a question all the time he was here. I thought that if I was correct in what I fancied, I should hear him say something. But he never did