BUT TOM CAN WRITE.

"A letter for you, Mrs. Trevarthen!"

Spring had come. The flight and finding of Myra had long since ceased to
be a nine days' wonder, and she and Clem and Tom Trevarthen--received back
into favour, and in some danger of being petted by Mrs. Purchase, who had
never been known to pet a seaman--were shipmates now on board the
_Virtuous Lady_, and had passed for many weeks now beyond ken of the
little port. A new schoolmistress reigned in Hester's stead, since
Hester, with the New Year, had taken over the care of the Widows' Houses.
In his counting-house at Hall Samuel Rosewarne sat day after day
transacting his business without a clerk, speaking seldom, shunned by
all--even by his own son; a man afraid of himself. Susannah declared that
the house was like a tomb, and vowed regularly on Monday mornings to give
'warning' at the next week-end. The villagers, accustomed to the
Rosewarne tyranny for generations, had found it hard to believe in their
release. Lady Killiow was little more than a name to them, Rosewarne a
very present steward and master of their lives; and at first, when Peter
Benny engaged workmen to pull down Nicky Vro's cottage and erect a modest
office on its site, they admired his temerity, but awoke each morning to
fresh wonder that no thunderbolt from Hall had descended during the night
and razed his work to the ground. The new ferryman had vanished too, paid
off and discharged for flagrant drunkenness, and his place was taken by
old Billy Daddo the Methodist--a change so comfortable and (when you come
to think of it) a choice so happy, that the villagers, after the shock of
surprise, could hardly believe they had not suggested it. If they did not
quite forget Nicky and his sorrows--if in place of Nicky's pagan chatter
they listened to Billy's earnest, gentle discourse, and might hardly cross
to meal or market without being reminded of God--why, after all, the word
of God was good hearing, and everyone ought to take an interest in it.
Stop your ears for a moment, and you could almost believe 'twas Nicky come
back to life again. Nobody could deny the man was cheerful and civil.
He rowed a stroke, too, amazingly like Nicky's.

As for Rosewarne, in the revulsion of their fears they began to despise
him. They Had done better to pity him.

Across the water, in her lodging in the Widows' Houses, Hester found work
to be done which, to her surprise, kept her busier than she had ev