He was not a man who gathered comrades round him; and as the years passed, his unapproachability of demeanour, which seemed intended to convey to people with a certain bitterness that he could do very well without them, increased.  It was said up in the town that he had taken to drink.  For after selling off his mackerel down on the quay, he would often now sit the whole day in Mother Andersen’s parlour with his brandy-glass before him; and when evening approached, and his head had had as much as it could carry, it was just as well to keep out of his way.  He did not talk much; and what attraction he found in Mother Andersen’s parlour it was not easy to say.  But they knew, at all events, how to treat him there; and he felt, from the casual questions that would be addressed to him after he had returned from sea, or from the way in which a newcomer would salute him, that he was in a sympathetic atmosphere, and that his name was in repute.  It was even something more than respect, perhaps, which he inspired, for a sailor would think twice before sitting down beside him, unless it came natural to him to do so from the way in which they had greeted or spoken to one other.

It was not, however, any attraction which he found in Mother Andersen’s parlour which made him spend so much of his time there; it was that he was afraid of his own temper at home.

When he had first set up on his own account, and had had his appointment as a duly certificated pilot for the object of his ambition, he had never made it his habit to stay in Arendal when he returned from sea instead of going home.  But some two or three years after he had settled out at Merdoe, a couple of incidents had occurred which made a new starting-point, as it were, in his domestic life.  They were the nomination of Captain Beck, who was now a wealthy man, to the post of master of the pilots of the district, and who, as such, became his superior; and the arrival of Carl Beck to live in Arendal and superintend his father’s shipbuilding yard, for which purpose he had retired from the navy.  Since the arrival of the Becks he had become more and more difficult to get on with; and Elizabeth’s secret, self-denying struggle grew proportionately harder.  Whenever she returned from a shopping expedition to Arendal, or from seeing her aunt, she would be sure to find him in an irritable humour, which would generally vent itself in contemptuous remarks upon old Beck’s incapacity for the post he held; and at last, much as she longed to get a glimpse now and then of something different from the monotony of her daily life out on Merdoe, she gave up going altogether.