“Gently, missy! . . .  There—­there didn’ seem anything to say.”

“There was one thing to say,” answered the girl sternly, “and there’s one thing to be done.”

“What’s that?”

“It mayn’t be an easy thing, altogether.  But you’ll be glad of it afterwards, and you may as well make up your mind to it.”

“Out with it!”

“Mrs Bosenna—­Why, what’s the matter?”—­for ’Bias had interrupted with a short laugh.

“I’d forgot Mrs Bosenna for the moment.”

“Right.  Then go on forgettin’ her, an’ give her up.  When you come to think it over,” urged Fancy with the air of a nurse who administers medicine to a child, “you’ll find ‘tis the only fit an’ proper thing to do.”

Again ’Bias laughed, and this time his laugh was even shorter and grimmer than before.

“Well and good—­but wait one moment, missy!  D’ye know what Cai Hocken said to me, last night in the garden, when he reckoned as I’d lost my money?  No, you don’t.  ‘Look here,’ he said, ’if you’ve still a mind to that woman and she’ve a mind to you, I’ll stand aside.’  That’s what he said:  and d’ye know what I answered?  I told him to go to hell.”

“I see.”  Fancy stood musing.

“Makes it a bit awkward, eh?—­Cai bein’ a man of spirit, with all his faults.”

“Well,” she decided, “unless we can find his money for him, he’ll have to marry her, whether or no.  ‘Faults,’ indeed?  I believe,” went on the wise child, “you two be more to one another than that woman ever was to either, or ever will be.”

“We won’t discuss that,” said ’Bias, “now that Cai’s got to marry her.”

Cai retired to bed early that night, wearied in all his limbs with much and aimless walking.  If, as he trudged highroad or lane in the early summer heat, any thought of Mrs Bosenna arose for a moment and conquered the anodyne of bodily exercise, it was not a thought of grudging her to ’Bias.  By the turn of Fortune’s wheel ’Bias would win her now.  To him, at all events, she was lost.  Cai had never courted her for her money:  but he had courted without distrust, on the strength of his own security in a competence.  At the back of his mind there may have lurked a suspicion that Mrs Bosenna, as a business woman, was not in the least likely to bestow her hand on a penniless sailor:  but there was no reason why he should allow this suspicion to obtrude itself, since self-respect would have forbidden him, being penniless, to pursue the courtship.

No; if he thought of Mrs Bosenna at all, it was in a sort of dull rage against her sex:  not specially against her, who happened to be her sex’s delegate to work this particular piece of mischief, but generally against womankind, that with a word or two, a look or two, it could rob a man of a friend—­and of such a friend as ’Bias!