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ROFESSOR MORGAN was an antiquarian and archæologist. He loved things that were old and things that had been long dead, and passed all his days among bones and stones and ponderous books. Nothing fresh and living played any part in his life, and he persistently withdrew himself from intercourse with his fellows. His prematurely bald head, his large bumpy forehead, and the studious stoop of his shoulders made him appear much older than he really was, and superficial observers imagined him to be as hard and as incapable of emotion as one of his own fossils. It was a rare thing for anyone to get a look from the grey eyes half hidden under the prominent brows. To those who by chance did obtain a full, direct glance from them, and who had the wit to read them aright, they were a revelation of the man. They were eyes that spoke, and the intensity of expression concentrated in them gave the lie to his otherwise emotionless aspect. The Professor was, in fact, no fossil. His heart could beat warm and quick, and a romance lay hidden under his outer husk of hardness and reserve.

Ten years ago Hugh Morgan, solitary, unknown, embittered in spirit and broken of heart, had come from abroad and taken up his residence in a lonely house fronting the the outskirts of a Welsh sea-coast village. It seemed an abode as congenial as could possibly be found. The neighbourhood for many miles round abounded in antiquarian remains, and the house itself had looked out on the Atlantic for three centuries or more. An isolated house and an isolated life. A house with a story to tell could it but speak, a human life with a hidden untold past. Those were the parallels Hugh Morgan drew between himself and his chosen home, feeling a dreary sort of kinship with it, and half imagining sometimes that it possessed a human soul, a soul that was as sad in its loneliness as he in his. Here year after year he lived in solitude, devoted apparently to science alone, the man to all outward appearances merged in the antiquarian. His tall figure, surmounted by a broad-brimmed hat drawn low over his capacious brow, became well known to all the inhabitants of the village and the neighbourhood around. Now and then it would be missed for six months or more at a time, when "The Professor," as he came to be