His eyes began to wander.

“To-morrow.”

She never tried again, for fear the man should go out of his mind on the spot.  He depended on her.  She seemed the only sensible person in the town; and he would congratulate himself frankly before her face on having secured such a levelheaded wife for his son.  The rest of the town, he confided to her once, in a fit of temper, was certainly queer.  The way they looked at you—­the way they talked to you!  He had never got on with any one in the place.  Didn’t like the people.  He would not have left his own country if it had not been clear that his son had taken a fancy to Colebrook.

She humoured him in silence, listening patiently by the fence; crocheting with downcast eyes.  Blushes came with difficulty on her dead-white complexion, under the negligently twisted opulence of mahogany-coloured hair.  Her father was frankly carroty.

She had a full figure; a tired, unrefreshed face.  When Captain Hagberd vaunted the necessity and propriety of a home and the delights of one’s own fireside, she smiled a little, with her lips only.  Her home delights had been confined to the nursing of her father during the ten best years of her life.

A bestial roaring coming out of an upstairs window would interrupt their talk.  She would begin at once to roll up her crochet-work or fold her sewing, without the slightest sign of haste.  Meanwhile the howls and roars of her name would go on, making the fishermen strolling upon the sea-wall on the other side of the road turn their heads towards the cottages.  She would go in slowly at the front door, and a moment afterwards there would fall a profound silence.  Presently she would reappear, leading by the hand a man, gross and unwieldy like a hippopotamus, with a bad-tempered, surly face.

He was a widowed boat-builder, whom blindness had overtaken years before in the full flush of business.  He behaved to his daughter as if she had been responsible for its incurable character.  He had been heard to bellow at the top of his voice, as if to defy Heaven, that he did not care:  he had made enough money to have ham and eggs for his breakfast every morning.  He thanked God for it, in a fiendish tone as though he were cursing.

Captain Hagberd had been so unfavourably impressed by his tenant, that once he told Miss Bessie, “He is a very extravagant fellow, my dear.”

She was knitting that day, finishing a pair of socks for her father, who expected her to keep up the supply dutifully.  She hated knitting, and, as she was just at the heel part, she had to keep her eyes on her needles.

“Of course it isn’t as if he had a son to provide for,” Captain Hagberd went on a little vacantly.  “Girls, of course, don’t require so much—­h’m-h’m.  They don’t run away from home, my dear.”

“No,” said Miss Bessie, quietly.

Captain Hagberd, amongst the mounds of turned-up earth, chuckled.  With his maritime rig, his weather-beaten face, his beard of Father Neptune, he resembled a deposed sea-god who had exchanged the trident for the spade.