He came, and they went along beside the river, where the wild cherry’s leaves fell blood red on the water, and where the hanging woods flamed in afternoon sunshine and made a brave glow.  For Dart at autumn time is a fine sight, and the beauty of the scene and the blue of the distant, clear and still beyond all that crimson and gold, tuned Christie to a melting mood.  She loved the sailor man very well indeed by now, and knew he loved her; and his calm manner and honest opinions, reposeful sort of nature and unconscious strength won her all the way.  For his part he’d never met a girl like her in his travels, and being now twenty-six and wishful to wed, felt that he’d be a very fortunate man to have such a wife as she promised to make.  He’d got his eye on a nice little house at St. Helier’s, where his relations dwelt, and he’d learned from Christie that she’d be well pleased to dwell there, or anywhere, out of sight and sound of her uncle and aunt Fox.  So, when he put the question, she answered it in a way to bring his arms round her and his lips on hers.  And though autumn was in the air, spring was in their hearts, no doubt, and they talked the usual hopeful talk, and dreamed the usual cheerful dreams, and knew themselves to be the happiest man and woman walking earth at that particular moment.

Nothing would do, but that Master Ted went off that instant to tell Jimmy Fox the news, and though Christie warned him that her uncle had very different ideas for her, he said, truly enough, that in these cases it was the woman’s view of a husband and not her uncle’s that ought to count.

But Jimmy very soon showed he wasn’t going to take Ted, and had no manner of use for him.  In fact, he let go pretty hot, and told Edmund Masters that the likes of him—­a sea-faring man with a wife in every port, no doubt—­wasn’t going to have Christie.  He blustered and he bullied and he insulted the young man shocking:  but the sailor kept his temper very well, and the quieter he was the fiercer old man Jimmy got.  And Polly Fox wasn’t no better.  She spit out her temper on Christie, and wanted to know how a girl, brought up with the fear of God in her eyes, could think twice of a common seafarer.

So seeing they were beyond reason, Masters took up his cap, and left.

“Keep your nerve, my gal,” he said to Christie, “and bide my time.  Let ’em see we mean what we say; and next voyage I come along, I’ll bring my credentials, and if Mr. Fox knows a man with better, then I’ll throw up the sponge, but not before.”

He took it in that calm and gentlemanlike fashion, but he didn’t know his company, or their ideas of proper behaviour; and he didn’t know the power her uncle had got over Christie, or the savage nature of the man, that would stick at nothing if crossed.

When he was gone, Fox ordered his niece to her chamber, and when she hesitated, he took her by the scruff of the neck, drove her upstairs to the dormer attic that was hers, pushed her in and locked the door on her.  “And there you shall bide, and there you shall starve till you beg my pardon and your aunt’s pardon, and take Mr. Bassett, as we will for you to do,” he said.