Jane was one, or two-and-twenty by now—­a pale, small-eyed maiden with a fine, strong body and a great appetite for manual work.  There was no taint from her mother in her and she lived out of doors for choice and loved a hard job.  She’d pile the dry-built, granite walls with any man, and do so much as him in a day; and folk, looking on her, foretold that she’d be rich beyond dreams, but never know how to get a pennyworth of pleasure out of all her money.

But Jane’s one and only idol was her father, and for him she would have done anything in her power.  She counted on him being good to live for ever, along of his cautious habits, and she’d give over all thought of any change in the home when the crash came and the even ripple of their lives was broke for her by a very unexpected happening.

Because, much to his own astonishment, John Warner found his mind dwelling on a wife once more—­the last thing as ever he expected to happen to him.  Indeed the discovery flustered the man not a little, and he set himself to consider such an upheaval most careful and weigh it, as he weighed everything, in the scales of his own future comfort and success.  He was a calculating man in all things, and yet it came over him gradual and sure that Mrs. Bascombe had got something to her which made a most forcible appeal and awakened fires he thought were gone out for ever when his wife died.  As for Nelly Bascombe, she was a widow and kept a shop-of-all-sorts in Little Silver and did well thereat, and Bascombe had been dead two years when his discovery dropped like a bolt out of a clear sky on John Warner.

It vexed him a bit at first and he put it away, after considering what an upstore a second wife would make in the snug and well-ordered scheme of his existence; but there it was and Nelly wouldn’t be put away.  So John examined the facts and came to the interesting conclusion that, in a manner of speaking, his own daughter was responsible for his fix.  Because, being such a wintry fashion of female, she made all others of the sex shine by contrast, and her father guessed it was just her manly, hard, bustling way that showed up the feminine softness and charming voice and general appealing qualities of Nelly Bascombe.

Nelly was a tall, fine woman of forty years old.  Her hair was thick and dark, her eyes a wondrous big pair and so grey as the mist, and her voice to poor Jane’s was like a blackbird against a guinea-fowl.  Farmer, he dropped in the shop pretty often to pass the time of day and measure her up; and for her part being a man-loving sort of woman, who had lost a good husband, but didn’t see no very stark cause why she shouldn’t find another, she discovered after a bit what was lurking in the farmer’s mind.  Then, like the rest of the parish, she wondered, for ’twas never thought that such an own-self man as Warner, and one so well suited by his daughter, would spoil his peace with another wife.