"By six months," said the Senior Tutor. "I first visited the Cove in
July, 1871, and you were then beginning to clear the ruins. All the
village talk still ran on the fire, with speculations on the cause of
it."

"The cause," said the Vicar, "will never be known. I may say that
pretty confidently, having spent more time in guessing than will ever
be spent by another man. . . . But since you never saw the old church
as it stood, you never saw the Heathen Lovers in the south aisle."

"Who were they?"

"They were a group of statuary, and a very strange one; executed, as
I first believed, in some kind of wax--but, pushing my researches
(for the thing interested me) I found the material to be a white
soapstone that crops out here and there in the crevices of our
serpentine. Indeed, I know to a foot the spot from which the
sculptor took it, close on two hundred years ago."

"It was of no great age, then?"

"No: and yet it bore all the marks of an immense age. For to begin
with, it had stood five-and-twenty years in this very garden, exposed
to all weathers, and the steatite (as they call it) is of all
substances the most friable--is, in fact, the stuff used by tailors
under the name of French chalk. Again, when, in 1719, my
predecessor, old Vicar Hichens, removed it to the church and set it
in the south aisle--or, at any rate, when he died and ceased to
protect it--the young men of the parish took to using it for a
hatstand, and also to carving their own and their sweethearts' names