Zachary smiled.

“Do you see that fly?” he said.  “Wel—­I care for you as little as this,” and he flicked the fly off his white trousers.  “Good-morning...!”

The noble mariners who manned our boat pulled lustily for the shore, but we had hardly shoved off’ when a storm of rain burst over the ship, and she seemed to vanish, leaving a picture on my eyes of the mate waving his cap above the rail, with his tanned young face bent down at us, smiling, keen, and friendly.

......  We reached the shore drenched, angry with ourselves, and with each
other; I started sulkily for home.

As I rode past an orchard, an apple, loosened by the rainstorm, came down with a thud.

“The apples were ripe and ready to fall, Oh! heigh-ho! and ready to fall.”

I made up my mind to pack, and go away.  But there’s a strangeness, a sort of haunting fascination in it all.  To you, who don’t know the people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly.  But it isn’t the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in life.  It’s the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for good or evil.

The sun was out again when I rode up to the farm; its yellow thatch shone through the trees as if sheltering a store of gladness and good news.  John Ford himself opened the door to me.

He began with an apology, which made me feel more than ever an intruder; then he said: 

“I have not spoken to my granddaughter—­I waited to see Dan Treffry.”

He was stern and sad-eyed, like a man with a great weight of grief on his shoulders.  He looked as if he had not slept; his dress was out of order, he had not taken his clothes off, I think.  He isn’t a man whom you can pity.  I felt I had taken a liberty in knowing of the matter at all.  When I told him where we had been, he said: 

“It was good of you to take this trouble.  That you should have had to!  But since such things have come to pass—­” He made a gesture full of horror.  He gave one the impression of a man whose pride was struggling against a mortal hurt.  Presently he asked: 

“You saw him, you say?  He admitted this marriage?  Did he give an explanation?”

I tried to make Pearse’s point of view clear.  Before this old man, with his inflexible will and sense of duty, I felt as if I held a brief for Zachary, and must try to do him justice.

“Let me understand,” he said at last.  “He stole her, you say, to make sure; and deserts her within a fortnight.”

“He says he meant to take her—­”

“Do you believe that?”

Before I could answer, I saw Pasiance standing at the window.  How long she had been there I don’t know.

“Is it true that he is going to leave me behind?” she cried out.

I could only nod.

“Did you hear him your own self?”

“Yes.”

She stamped her foot.