“Well, it is a hard knot for her to untie, poor child; and on the strength of having saved my life, she shall untie it her own way.  I can wait.  I hope the money won’t be spent meanwhile, though, and the empty leather returned to me when wanted no longer.  However, that’s done already, if done at all.  I was a fool for not acting at once;—­a double fool for suspecting her!  Ass that I was, to take up with a false scent, and throw myself off the true one!  My everlasting unbelief in people has punished itself this time.  I might have got a search-warrant three months ago, and had that old witch safe in the bilboes.  But no—­I might not have found it, after all, and there would have been only an esclandre; and if I know that girl’s heart, she would have been ten times more miserable for her mother than for herself, so it’s as well as it is.  Besides, it’s really good fun to watch how such a pretty plot will work itself out;—­as good as a pack of harriers with a cold scent and a squatted hare.  So, live and let live.  Only, Thomas Thurnall, if you go for to come for to go for to make such an abominable ass of yourself with that young lady any more, like a miserable school-boy, you will be pleased to make tracks, and vanish out of these parts for ever.  For my purse can’t afford to have you marrying a schoolmistress in your impoverished old age; and my character, which also is my purse, can’t afford worse.”

One word of Grace’s had fixed itself in Tom’s memory.  What did she mean by “her two?”

He contrived to ask Willis that very evening.

“Oh, don’t you know, sir?  She had a young brother drowned, a long while ago, when she was sixteen or so.  He went out fishing on the Sabbath, with another like him, and both were swamped.  Wild young lads, both, as lads will be.  But she, sweet maid, took it so to heart, that she never held up her head since; nor will, I think, at times, to her dying day.”

“Humph!  Was she fond of the other lad, then?”

“Sir,” said Willis, “I don’t think it’s fair like,—­not decent, if you’ll excuse an old sailor,—­to talk about young maids’ affairs, that they wouldn’t talk of themselves, perhaps not even to themselves.  So I never asked any questions myself.”

“And think it rude in me to ask any.  Well, I believe you’re right, good old gentleman that you are.  What a nobleman you’d have made, if you had had the luck to have been born in that station of life!”

“I have found too much trouble, in doing my duty in my humble place, to wish to be in any higher one.”

“So!” thought Tom to himself, “a girl’s fancy:  but it explains so much in the character, especially when the temperament is melancholic.  However, to quote Solomon once more, ’A live dog is better than a dead lion;’ and I have not much to fear from a rival who has been washed out of this world ten years since.  Heyday!  Rival! quotha?  Tom Thurnall, you are going to make a fool of yourself.  You must go, sir!  I warn you; you must flee, till you have recovered your senses.”