With that he left her, and Alice Chick, who knew all about it and was hiding outside the door, showed him up to Christie’s chamber.

The girl was ready for him, and before I can tell it he had her box on his back and was down and away with her at his heels.

A minute later they were in the ferry boat and off to Dartmouth.  The tide was just on the turn and helped ’em.

They heard Polly screaming the top of her head off one side the river; while a muffled noise, like a bull-frog croaking, came from the ferry steps at Green way.

“The owls are making a funny noise to-night sure enough!” said the skipper of The Provider.

But Ted was busy.  He’d forgot nothing, and now pulled a lot of food out of his pocket for the starving woman.

“Eat and say nought,” he ordered, and then he took an oar and helped his friend.

Before dawn the schooner was hull down on her way to the Islands, and folk at Dartmouth stared to see the Dittisham ferry boat adrift in the harbour; but presently there came Jimmy Fox calling on all the law and the prophets for vengeance; and then the nation heard about his troubles and the terrible adventure that had overtook the poor man and his wife.  But both were tolerably well known up and down the river, and I didn’t hear that anybody went out of the way to show sympathy.

In fact, when the story leaked out, which it did do next time The Provider was over, most people agreed with Edmund Masters that he’d done very clever.

Christie was married to Ted at St. Heliers when he came back to her after the next voyage, and Fox and his good lady got wind of it, of course; but ’tis generally allowed they didn’t send her no wedding present.

Somebody did, however, for when William Bassett heard how things had fallen out, his romantical character came to his aid, and, such are the vagaries of human nature, that he sent Mrs. Masters a five-pound note.

“Just to show you the sort of man you might have took, my dear,” he wrote to her.

No.  VI

MOTHER’S MISFORTUNE

I shall always say I did ought to have married Gregory Sweet when my husband dropped, and nobody can accuse me of not doing my bestest to that end.  In a womanly way, knowing the man had me in his eye from the funeral onwards, and before for that matter, I endeavoured to make it so easy for him as I could without loss of self-respect; and he can hear me out, and if he don’t the neighbours will.

But there it was.  Gregory suffered from defects of character, too prone to show themselves in a bachelor man after the half century he turned.  He pushed caution to such extremes that you can only call ungentlemanly where a nice woman’s concerned, and I never shall know to my dying day what kept him off me.  A man of good qualities too, but a proper slave to the habit of caution, and though I’d be the last to undervalue the virtue which never was wanted more than now, yet, when the coast lies clear and the sun’s shining and the goal in sight, and that goal me, ’twas a depressing thing for the man to hold back without any sane reason for so doing.