After six years of wedlock they quarrelled one day, about nothing at all:  at least, Simon Hancock, though unable to state the exact cause of strife, felt himself ready to swear it was nothing more serious than the cooking of the day’s dinner.  From that date, however, the pair lived in the house together and never spoke.  The man happened to be of the home-keeping sort—­possessed no friends and never put foot inside a public-house.  Through the long evenings he would sit beside his own fender, with his wife facing him, and never a word flung across the space between them, only now and then a look of cold hate.  The few that saw them thus said it was like looking on a pair of ugly statues.  And this lasted for four years.

Of course the matter came to their minister’s ears—­he was a “Brianite”—­and the minister spoke to them after prayer-meeting, one Wednesday night, and called at the cottage early next morning, to reconcile them.  He stayed fifteen minutes and came away, down the street, with a look on his face such as Moses might have worn on his way down from Mount Sinai, if only Moses had seen the devil there, instead of God.

At the end of four years, the neighbours remarked that for two days no smoke had issued from the chimney of this cottage, nor had anyone seen the front door opened.  There grew a surmise that the quarrel had flared out at last, and the wedded pair were lying within, in their blood.  The anticipated excitement of finding the bodies was qualified, however, by a very present sense of the manner in which the bodies had resented intrusion during life.  It was not until sunset on the second day that the constable took heart to break in the door.

There were no corpses.  The kitchen was tidy, the hearth swept, and the house empty.  On the table lay a folded note, addressed, in the man’s handwriting, to the minister.

“Dear Friend in Grace,” it began, “we have been married ten years, and neither has broken the other; until which happens, it must be hell between us.  We see no way out but to part for ten years more, going our paths without news of each other.  When that time’s up, we promise to meet here, by our door, on the morning of the first Monday in October month, and try again.  And to this we set our names.”—­here the two names followed.

They must have set out by night; for an extinguished candle stood by the letter, with ink-pot and pen.  Probably they had parted just outside the house, the one going inland up the hill, the other down the street towards the harbour.  Nothing more was heard of them.  Their furniture went to pay the quarter’s rent due to the Squire, and the cottage, six months later, passed into the occupation of Simon Hancock, waterman.

At this point Simon shall take up the narrative:—­

“I’d been tenant over there”—­with a nod towards the ruin—­“nine year an’ goin’ on for the tenth, when, on a Monday mornin’, about this time o’ year, I gets out o’ bed at five o’clock an’ down to the quay to have a look at my boat; for ’twas the fag-end of the Equinox, and ther’d been a ‘nation gale blowin’ all Sunday and all Sunday night, an’ I thought she might have broke loose from her moorin’s.