“I think,” said he one day before he was three years old, “that my father is in one of those ships.”

“Bless the child!” exclaimed old Pezzack.  “Who says you have a father?”

“Everybody has a father.  Dicky Tregenza has one; they both work down at the rock.  I asked Dicky, and he told me.”

“Told ’ee what?”

“That everybody has a father.  I asked him if mine was out in one of those ships, and he said very likely.  I asked mother, too, but she was washing-up and wouldn’t listen.”

Old Pezzack regarded the child grimly. “’Twas to be, I s’pose,” he muttered.

Lizzie Pezzack had never set foot inside the Raymonds’ cottage.  Humility, gentle soul as she was, could on some points be as unchristian as other women.  As time went on it seemed that not a soul beside herself and Taffy knew of Honoria’s suspicion.  She even doubted, and Taffy doubted too, if Lizzie herself knew such an accusation had been made.  Certainly never by word or look had Lizzie hinted at it.  Yet Humility could not find it in her heart to forgive her.  “She may be innocent,” was the thought; “but through her came the injury to my son.”  Taffy by this time had no doubt at all.  It was George who poisoned Honoria’s ear; George’s shame and Honoria’s pride would explain why the whisper had never gone further; and nothing else would explain.

Did his mother guess this?  He believed so at times, but they never spoke of it.

The lame child was often in the Raymonds’ kitchen.  Lizzie did not forbid or resent this.  And he liked Humility, and would talk to her at length while he nibbled one of her dripping-cakes.  “People don’t tell the truth,” he observed sagely on one of these occasions.  (He pronounced it “troof,” by the way.) “I know why we live here.  It’s because we’re near the sea.  My father’s on the sea somewhere looking for us, and grandfather lights the lamp every night to tell him where we are.  One night he’ll see it and bring his ship in and take us all off together.”

“Who told you all this?”

“Nobody.  People won’t tell me nothing (nofing).  I has to make it out in my head.”

At times, when his small limbs grew weary (though he never acknowledged this) he would stretch himself on the short turf of the headland and lie staring up at the white gulls.  No one ever came near enough to surprise the look which then crept over the child’s face.  But Taffy, passing him at a distance, remembered another small boy, and shivered to remember and compare—­

     “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
      And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

—­But how when the boy is a cripple?

One afternoon he was stooping to inspect an obstinate piece of boring when the man at his elbow said: 

“Hullo! edn’ that young Joey Pezzack in diffities up there?  Blest if the cheeld won’t break his neck wan of these days!”