son Jack who did so.

He'd gone to sea when he was fifteen, but kept in touch with his folk and
left the sea and found work in the West Indies and bided there for
five-and-twenty years. And now he came back, brown as a berry and ugly as
need be. At forty you might say Jack Cobley couldn't be beat for
plainness; and yet, after all, I've seen better-looking men that was
uglier, if you understand me, because, though his countenance put you in
mind of an old church gargoyle, yet it was kindly and benevolent in its
hideousness, and he had good, trustful eyes; and, to the thinking mind, a
man's expression matters more than the shape of his mouth or the cut of
his nose.

Jack hadn't much to say about his adventures, for he was a very quiet man
and better liked to list than talk; but he didn't make no splash when he
came back and he was content to settle with his mother and till her little
vegetable patch.

He'd stand a drink at the 'Man and Horse' public-house and, if he felt
himself among friends, he'd open out a bit and tell stories of the land
where he had lived and worked; but he proved to be the retiring sort and
hadn't got anything to say about money. In fact, it didn't seem to be a
subject that interested him over much and there was nothing in his
apparel, or manner of life, or general outlook that seemed to show as he'd
done very well in foreign parts.

So the people came to the natural conclusion that if he'd made any sort of
pile, it was a small one, while some folk went to extremes and reckoned
that Jack had come back to his mother without a bean, and was content to
live on her and share her annuity. Because Mrs. Cobley, though her husband
left little beyond his cottage, which was his own, took one hundred and
fifty pounds per annum for life under the will of the last lady of the
Manor of Little Silver.

Mary had served her ladyship as maid for fifteen years before she took
Cobley, and she was a tower of strength to that important woman and had
come to be generously remembered according.

So Jack was a mystery, in a manner of speaking. He bought himself a horse,
and a good one, and was very fond of riding round about over the moor and
joining in a meet of foxhounds sometimes; but that was his only pleasure;
and his mother, when a woman here and there asked if her son was minded to
wed, would answer that she'd never heard him unfold his feelings on that
matter, and reckoned he'd got no intentions towards the w