But if I had felt no incongruity in paying this respectful visit to my ex-cook and her lover, I own that her appearance made me stare.  For, if you please, she was dressed out like a lady, in a gown of pale blue satin trimmed with swansdown—­a low-necked gown, too, though she had flung a white shawl over her shoulders.  Imagine this and the flood of blue light around us, and you will hardly wonder that, half-way up the ladder, I paused to take breath.  Tubal Cain was dressed as usual, and tucking his fiddle under his arm, led me up to shake hands with his bride as if she were a queen.  I cannot say if she blushed.  Certainly she received me with dignity:  and then, inverting a bucket that lay on the deck, seated herself; while Tubal Cain and I sat down on the deck facing her, with our backs against the bulwarks.

“It’s just this, sir,” explained the bridegroom, laying his fiddle across his lap, and speaking as if in answer to a question:  “it’s just this:—­by trade you know me for a watchmaker, and for a Plymouth Brother by conviction.  All the week I’m bending over a counter, and every Sabbath-day I speak in prayer-meeting what I hold, that life’s a dull pilgrimage to a better world.  If you ask me, sir, to night, I ought to say the same.  But a man may break out for once; and when so well as on his honeymoon?  For a week I’ve been a free heathen:  for a week I’ve been hiding here, living with the woman I love in the open air; and night after night for a week Annie here has clothed herself like a woman of fashion.  Oh, my God! it has been a beautiful time—­a happy beautiful time that ends to-night!”

He set down the fiddle, crooked up a knee and clasped his hands round it, looking at Annie.

“Annie, girl, what is it that we believe till to-morrow morning?  You believe—­eh?—­that ’tis a rare world, full of delights, and with no ugliness in it?”

Annie nodded.

“And you love every soul—­the painted woman in the streets no less than your own mother?”

Annie nodded again.  “I’d nurse ’em both if they were sick,” she said.

“One like the other?”

“And there’s nothing shames you?” Here he rose and took her hand.  “You wouldn’t blush to kiss me before master here?”

“Why should I?” She gave him a sober kiss, and let her hand rest in his.

I looked at her.  She was just as quiet as in the old days when she used to lay my table.  It was like gazing at a play.

I should be ashamed to repeat the nonsense that Tubal Cain thereupon began to talk; for it was mere midsummer madness.  But I smoked four pipes contentedly while the sound of his voice continued, and am convinced that he never performed so well at prayer-meeting.  Down at the town I heard the church-clock striking midnight, and then one o’clock; and was only aroused when the youth started up and grasped his fiddle.

“And now, sir, if you would consent to one thing, ’twould make us very happy.  You can’t play the violin, worse luck; but you might take a step or two round the deck with Annie, if I strike up a waltz-tune for you to move to.”