eting, and
neither smiled nor kissed her. She was devoted to her son, and no
woman was too good for him. Her son had loved her, and Rachel had
come between them. The old woman made up her mind to hate the girl,
because her fine manners and comely face were a daily rebuke to her
own coarse habits and homely looks, and an hourly contrast always
present to Stephen's eyes.

Stephen was as idle as ever, and less ashamed of his sloth now that
there was someone to keep the wolf from the door. His mother accepted
with cheerfulness the duty of bread-winner to her son, but Rachel's
helplessness chafed her. For all her fine fingering the girl could
finger nothing that would fill the pot. "A pretty wife you've brought
me home to keep," she muttered morning and night.

But Rachel's abasement was not even yet at its worst. "Oh," she
thought, "if I could but get back my husband to myself alone, he
would see my humiliation and save me from it." She went a woman's way
to work to have the old mother sent home to Stappen. But the trick
that woman's wit can devise woman's wit can baulk, and the old mother
held her ground. Then the girl bethought her of her old shame at
living in a hovel close to her father's house, and asked to be taken
away. Anywhere, anywhere, let it be to the world's end, and she would
follow. Stephen answered that one place was like another in Iceland,
where the people were few and all knew their history; and, as for
foreign parts, though a seaman he was not a seagoing man, farther
than the whale-fishing lay about their coasts, and that, go where
they might to better their condition, yet other poor men were there
already. At that, Rachel's heart sank, for she saw that the great
body of her husband must cover a pigmy soul. Bound she was for all
her weary days to the place of her disgrace, doomed she was to live
to the last with the woman who hated her, and to eat that woman's
bitter bread. She was heavy with child at this time, and her spirit
was broken. So she sat herself down with her feet to the hearth, and
wept.

There the old mother saw her as often as she bustled in and out of
the house from the beach, and many a gibe she flung her way. But
Stephen sat beside her one day with a shame-faced look, and cursed
his luck, and said if he only had an open boat of his own what he
would do for both of them. She asked how much a boat would cost him,
and he answered sixty kroner; that a Scotch captain then in the
harbor