“Isn’t anybody coming down along with me to have a try?” the coastguard demanded at the top of his voice.

Mark did not hear his grandfather’s reply; he only saw him go over the cliff’s edge at the end of one rope while Eddowes went down on another.  A minute later the slipknot came untied (or that was how the accident was explained) and the Vicar went to join the drowned mariners, dislodging as he fell the man whom he had tried to save, so that of the crew of the brig Happy Return not one ever came to port.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect upon Mark Lidderdale of that night.  He was twelve years old at the time; but the years in Cornwall had retarded that precocious development to which he seemed destined by the surroundings of his early childhood in Lima Street, and in many ways he was hardly any older than he was when he left London.  In after years he looked back with gratitude upon the shock he received from what was as it were an experience of the material impact of death, because it made him think about death, not morbidly as so many children and young people will, but with the apprehension of something that really does come in a moment and for which it is necessary for every human being to prepare his soul.  The platitudes of age may often be for youth divine revelations, and there is nothing so stimulating as the unaided apprehension of a great commonplace of existence.  The awe with which Mark was filled that night was too vast to evaporate in sentiment, and when two days after this there came news from Africa that his father had died of black-water fever that awe was crystallized indeed.  Mark looking round at his small world perceived that nobody was safe.  To-morrow his mother might die; to-morrow he might die himself.  In any case the death of his grandfather would have meant a profound change in the future of his mother’s life and his own; the living of Nancepean would fall to some other priest and with it the house in which they lived.  Parson Trehawke had left nothing of any value except Gould’s Birds of Great Britain and a few other works of ornithology.  The furniture of the Vicarage was rich neither in quality nor in quantity.  Three or four hundred pounds was the most his daughter could inherit.  She had spoken to Mark of their poverty, because in her dismay for the future of her son she had no heart to pretend that the dead man’s money was of little importance.

“I must write and ask your father what we ought to do.” . . .  She stopped in painful awareness of the possessive pronoun.  Mark was unresponsive, until there came the news from Africa, which made him throw his arms about his mother’s neck while she was still alive.  Mrs. Lidderdale, whatever bitterness she may once have felt for the ruin of her married life, shed fresh tears of sorrow for her husband, and supposing that Mark’s embrace was the expression of his sympathy wept more, as people will when others are sorry for them, and then still