utation in town, what's a little row in the
suburban districts! It's an awfully insignificant affair, anyway, it
seems to me. We may as well talk sense, and the plainer the better.
People don't employ lenses for shortsightedness in that
particular--common sense, I mean. You walk without seeing, Miss
Hungerford, and you're bound to get infernally cheated, in some shape.
Why not me, I say, as well as another?"

Still, the fisherman's words roused no bitterness in me. His hardened
recklessness of speech served rather to strengthen me in the part I had
to play of the unapproachably sublime.

"I cannot consider that question," I said, with my hand on the door.

He swept my face with a keen glance that had lost none of its derisive
quality.

"So it's true, then!" he said. "The ultimatum has been reached, at last,
in the possessor of a pretty face and a broken fiddle! and dreams for the
restoration of the race are to end in a broken-down hovel by the sea,
in darning the Cradlebow's socks, and dressing the clams for dinner,
while the bucolic George Olver and the versatile Harvey, and all the rest
of the awkward, moon-gazing crew, take turns in sitting on the door-step,
and dilating on the weather! Ravishing idyll but it lacks substantiality.
It lacks seriousness."

I heard that mocking laugh again without emotion, except it might be for
a faint, far-off echo in my breast of the fisherman's own scorn. Above
all, I was weary, and willing to make my escape.

"We cannot help each other by standing here talking," I said, and added a
"good bye."

It was the last time, probably, that I should see the fisherman's face;
but he refused the valediction with a toss of the head.

"Oh, no!" he said; "it isn't time for my obsequies. I shall return to
town for a few days or weeks only; this detestable place has always
thrown a spell over me. I can't rid myself of it. Like the natives of
Wallencamp, I always drift back to it again."

It was growing dark. I found Madeline waiting for me in the lane.
Somewhat piqued at the persistency of the little woman's ministrations, I
informed her briefly, that I had found the fisherman in the school-house,
and had been conversing with him there; but she put her hand in my arm
with an air of unshaken confidence.

CHAPTER XVI.

GEORGE OLVER'S LOVE FOR BECKY.

"I'd like to see you alone a few minutes, teacher, if you please."

It was George Olver who spoke, in his sturdy, resolute bass.