’Mammy will carry Bella; and when Bella goes past the poor man, she shall give him the cake over mammy’s shoulder.  Poor man is so hungry; and Bella and mammy have plenty to eat, and to spare.’

The child’s heart was touched by the idea of hunger, and her little arm was outstretched ready for the moment her mother’s hurried steps took her brushing past the startled, trembling Philip.

‘Poor man, eat this; Bella not hungry.’

They were the first words he had ever heard his child utter.  The echoes of them rang in his ears as he stood endeavouring to hide his disfigured face by looking over the parapet of the bridge down upon the stream running away towards the ocean, into which his hot tears slowly fell, unheeded by the weeper.  Then he changed the intention with which he had set out upon his nightly walk, and turned back to his lodging.

Of course the case was different with Sylvia; she would have forgotten the whole affair very speedily, if it had not been for little Bella’s frequent recurrence to the story of the hungry man, which had touched her small sympathies with the sense of an intelligible misfortune.  She liked to act the dropping of the bun into the poor man’s hand as she went past him, and would take up any article near her in order to illustrate the gesture she had used.  One day she got hold of Hester’s watch for this purpose, as being of the same round shape as the cake; and though Hester, for whose benefit the child was repeating the story in her broken language for the third or fourth time, tried to catch the watch as it was intended that she should (she being the representative of the ‘hungry man’ for the time being), it went to the ground with a smash that frightened the little girl, and she began to cry at the mischief she had done.

‘Don’t cry, Bella,’ said Hester.  ’Niver play with watches again.  I didn’t see thee at mine, or I’d ha’ stopped thee in time.  But I’ll take it to old Darley’s on th’ quay-side, and maybe he’ll soon set it to rights again.  Only Bella must niver play with watches again.’

‘Niver no more!’ promised the little sobbing child.  And that evening Hester took her watch down to old Darley’s.

This William Darley was the brother of the gardener at the rectory; the uncle to the sailor who had been shot by the press-gang years before, and to his bed-ridden sister.  He was a clever mechanician, and his skill as a repairer of watches and chronometers was great among the sailors, with whom he did a very irregular sort of traffic, conducted. often without much use of money, but rather on the principle of barter, they bringing him foreign coins and odd curiosities picked up on their travels in exchange for his services to their nautical instruments or their watches.  If he had ever had capital to extend his business, he might have been a rich man; but it is to be doubted whether he would have been as happy as he was now in his queer little habitation of two rooms, the front one being both shop and workshop, the other serving the double purpose of bedroom and museum.