Jenny hid the great hopes in her mind, for she doubted if she could trust Will with the news.

“How can I marry anybody until I know Nicky is dead?” she inquired of the man, as she often had before.

“If he’s alive, then that makes him a low-down villain, and you ought never to think of the creature again.  If he’s alive, he’s happy without you.  Happy without you—­think of that!  But of course he’s not alive.”

“Until we know the solemn, certain truth about him I’m for no other man,” she told him; and her words seemed to give Will a notion.

“‘The truth about him’:  that’s an idea,” he said.

“It is now a year since he went to fish and vanished off the earth,” went on Jenny.  “I’ve sometimes thought that the people didn’t search half so carefully for the dear chap as what they might.”

“I did, I’ll swear.  I hunted like an otter for the man.”

“You never loved my husband,” she said, shaking her head, and he granted it.

“Certainly I never did.  Weren’t likely I could love the man who was your husband.  But I tried to find Spider, and I’ll try again—­yes, faith!  I’ll try again harder than ever.  He’s in the river somewheres—­what be left of him.  The rames[1] of the man must be in the water round about where he was fishing.”

    [1] Rames = Skeleton.

“What’s the use of talking cruel things like that?”

“Every use.  Why, if I was to find enough to swear by, you could give him Christian burial,” said Will, who knew how to touch her—­the cunning blade.  “Think of that—­a proper funeral for him and a proper gravestone in the churchyard.  What would you give me if I was to fetch him ashore after all?”

Jenny White felt exceedingly safe with her promises now.  She’d got a woman’s conviction, which be stronger than a man’s reason every time, that Spider was alive and kicking, and had run away for some fantastic jealousy or other foolishness.  For the little man was always in extremes.  She felt that once she faced him, she’d soon conquer and have him home in triumph very likely; and so she didn’t much care what she said to Will that morning.  Besides, the thought of giving the man a job that would keep him out of her way, for a week perhaps, rather pleased her.

“I’ll give you anything I’ve got to give if you bring my poor Nicky’s bones to light,” she said.  “But it’s impossible after all this time.”

Will Westaway’s mind was in full working order by now.

“Nought’s impossible to a man that loves a woman like what I love you,” he said.  “How was the poor blade dressed the day he went to his death?  Can you call home what he’d got on?”

“Every stitch down to his socks,” she answered.  “He’d got his old billycock hat and his moleskin trousers and a flannel shirt—­dark blue—­and a red-wool muffler what I knitted him myself and made him wear because it was a cruel cold afternoon.  And his socks was ginger-coloured.  They was boughten socks from Mrs. Carslake’s shop of all sorts.  He was cranky all that day and using awful crooked words to me.  I believe he knew he weren’t coming back.”