Professor Morgan's Romance.

By

KATE

.[J] I,

AN ISOLATED HOUSE

RO ESSOR MORGAN was an antiquarian and archaeolo-

gist. e loved thigs that were old and things that had been long dead, and passed

all his davs among bones and stones and ponderous hooks. \()thm“ fresh and Iiving plaved any part in his and he persistently withdrew himsell from inter- coursc with his fellows. His prematurely bald head; his large bumpy forchead, and the studious stoop his shoulders made him appear much older than he really was, and superticial observers imagined him to be as hard and as incapable of emotion as one of his own fossils. Tt was a rare thing for anyone to get a look from the grev ceves half hidden under the prominent brows. T'o those who by chance did obtain a full, direct glanee from them, and who had the wit to read them aright, they were a revela- tion of the man. They were ceyes that spoke, and the intensity of expression con- centrated m them gave the lic to his otherwise emotionless aspect. ‘I'he Professor was, m fact, no fossil. Idis heart could beat warm and quick, and a romance lay hidden under his outer husk of hardness and reserve.

ol

AN

DOAN IsoLATED LirE

Ten years ago Tugh Morgan, solitary, unknown, embittered in SpIrit lnul\Ln of heart, had come from abroad and taken up his residence ina lonely house fronting the sea on the outskirts of a Welsh sea-coast village. Tt secemed 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 solated 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

magining sometimes that it possessed a human soul; a soul that was as sad in its lonchiness as he in his. Here year after year he hved in o solitude, devoted appa- rently to o sclence alone, the man to all

outward appearances mu%d 1 the antiqua- rian. s tall figure, surmounted by a broad- brimmed hat drawn low over his capacious hrow, well known to all the inhabit- ants ol the village and the ncighbourhood around. Now and then it would be missed for six months or more at a time, when “The Professor,” as he came to be