She offered her arm to Clara as she spoke.  Clara refused it.  She took Crayford’s arm, and clung to him.

“I’m frightened, dreadfully frightened!” she said to him, faintly.  “You keep with me—­a woman is no protection; I want to be with you.”  She looked round again at the boat-house doorway.  “Oh!” she whispered, “I’m cold all over—­I’m frozen with fear of this place.  Come into the yard!  Come into the yard!”

“Leave her to me,” said Crayford to his wife.  “I will call you, if she doesn’t get better in the open air.”

He took her out at once, and closed the yard door behind them.

“Mr. Steventon, do you understand this?” asked Mrs. Crayford.  “What can she possibly be frightened of?”

She put the question, still looking mechanically at the door by which her husband and Clara had gone out.  Receiving no reply, she glanced round at Steventon.  He was standing on the opposite side of the luncheon-table, with his eyes fixed attentively on the view from the main doorway of the boat-house.  Mrs. Crayford looked where Steventon was looking.  This time there was something visible.  She saw the shadow of a human figure projected on the stretch of smooth yellow sand in front of the boat-house.

In a moment more the figure appeared.  A man came slowly into view, and stopped on the threshold of the door.

Chapter 18.

The man was a sinister and terrible object to look at.  His eyes glared like the eyes of a wild animal; his head was bare; his long gray hair was torn and tangled; his miserable garments hung about him in rags.  He stood in the doorway, a speechless figure of misery and want, staring at the well-spread table like a hungry dog.

Steventon spoke to him.

“Who are you?”

He answered, in a hoarse, hollow voice,

“A starving man.”

He advanced a few steps, slowly and painfully, as if he were sinking under fatigue.

“Throw me some bones from the table,” he said.  “Give me my share along with the dogs.”

There was madness as well as hunger in his eyes while he spoke those words.  Steventon placed Mrs. Crayford behind him, so that he might be easily able to protect her in case of need, and beckoned to two sailors who were passing the door of the boat-house at the time.

“Give the man some bread and meat,” he said, “and wait near him.”

The outcast seized on the bread and meat with lean, long-nailed hands that looked like claws.  After his first mouthful of the food, he stopped, considered vacantly with himself, and broke the bread and meat into two portions.  One portion he put into an old canvas wallet that hung over his shoulder; the other he devoured voraciously.  Steventon questioned him.

“Where do you come from?”

“From the sea.”

“Wrecked?”

“Yes.”

Steventon turned to Mrs. Crayford.