e
vapours. Eventually she made herself believe that she was an ill-used
person. She never ceased to complain of her fate. Everybody treated her
as if she had laid plans for her husband's ruin.

The husband continued to love her, but little by little he grew to
despise her also. When he made his first plunge, he had prided himself
on indulging an heroic impulse. He was not going to deliver a good woman
to dishonour because she seemed to be an obstacle to his success. But
she had never realised his sacrifice. She did not appear to understand
that he might have been a great man in the island, but that love and
honour had held him back. Her ignorance was pitiful, and he was ashamed
of it. In earning the contempt of others he had not saved himself from
self-contempt.

The old sailor died suddenly in a fit of drunkenness at a fair, and
husband and wife came into possession of his house and property at
Ballure. This did not improve the relations between them. The woman
perceived that their positions were reversed. She was the bread-bringer
now. One day, at a slight that her husband's people had put upon her
in the street, she reminded him, in order to re-establish her wounded
vanity, that but for her and hers he would not have so much as a roof to
cover him.

Yet the man continued to love her in spite of all. And she was not
at first a degraded being. At times she was bright and cheerful, and,
except in the worst spells of her vapours, she was a brisk and busy
woman. The house was sweet and homely. There was only one thing to drive
him away from it, but that was the greatest thing of all. Nevertheless
they had their cheerful hours together.

A child was born, a boy, and they called him Philip. He was the
beginning of the end between them; the iron stay that held them together
and yet apart. The father remembered his misfortunes in the presence
of his son, and the mother was stung afresh by the recollection of
disappointed hopes. The boy was the true heir of Ballawhaine, but the
inheritance was lost to him by his father's fault and he had nothing.

Philip grew to be a winsome lad. There was something sweet and amiable
and big-hearted, and even almost great, in him. One day the father
sat in the garden by the mighty fuchsia-tree that grows on the lawn,
watching his little fair-haired son play at marbles on the path with two
big lads whom he had enticed out of the road, and another more familiar
playmate--the little barefoo