“Oh! there’s always bin a tidy lot of money behind young Darcy, and is yet I reckon, Mrs. Faircloth being the first-class business woman she is.  Spend she may with one hand, but save, and make, she does and no mistake, Lord love you, with the other.  Singular thing though,” he added meditatively, his face growing wholly expressionless, “how little Darcy, now he’s growed up, features old Lemuel his father.  Squinny, red-cheeked little old party, he was; thin as a herring, and chilly, always chilly, sitting over the fire in the bar-parlour winter and summer too—­small squeaky voice he had minding any one of a penny whistle.  But a warm man and a close one—­oh! very secret.  Anybody must breakfast overnight and hurry at that—­eat with their loins girded, as you may say, to get upsides with old Lemuel.”

He ceased speaking, and glanced round over his shoulder calculating the distance to the breakwater, for the boat drew level with the sea-wall of rough-hewn pinkish-grey granite along the river frontage of The Hard gardens.

“There’s some as ’ud tell you it was the surprise of old Lemuel’s life to find himself a parent,” he added, eyeing Tom slyly as he spoke, his mouth remaining open as in preparation for coming laughter.

For those same scandalous little fishes were well into the frying-pan, now—­sizzling, frizzling.  And this was a vastly agreeable moment to William Jennifer, worth waiting for, worth scheming for.  Unprintable humour looked out of his twinkling eyes while he watched to see how far Tom Verity caught his meaning.  Then as the young man flushed, sudden distaste, even a measure of shame invading him, Jennifer, true artist in scandal, turned the conversation aside with an air of indulgent apology.

“But, lor, there, you know how people’ll talk in a little country place where there ain’t much doing!—­And it ain’t for me to speak of what happened back in those times, being barely out of my teens then and away cow-keeping over Alton way for Farmer Whimsett.  Regular chip of the old block, he was.  Don’t breed that sort nowadays.  As hearty as you like, and swallered his three pints of home-brewed every morning with his breakfast he did, till he was took off quite sudden in his four-score-and-ten twelve months ago come Michaelmas.”

Upon the terrace, by the pyramid of ball and the two little cannons, Sir Charles Verity stood, holding a packet of newly written letters in his hand and smoking, while he watched the approaching boat.  Damaris rose from the pile of red-brown fishing-nets and waved to him.  Jennifer, too, glanced up, steadying both oars with one hand while he raised the other to the brim of his thimble-crowned hat.  A couple of minutes more and he would part company with his passenger, and so judged it safe to indulge himself with a final fish-frying.