ok no small pains to identify her with himself for his
own convenience, and secretly determined she shouldn't wed if he could
help it. Little by little he poisoned her mind against matrimony, praised
the independent women and showed how such were better off every way, with
no husband and family to fret their lives and spoil their freedom.

Jane was one, or two-and-twenty by now--a pale, small-eyed maiden with a
fine, strong body and a great appetite for manual work. There was no taint
from her mother in her and she lived out of doors for choice and loved a
hard job. She'd pile the dry-built, granite walls with any man, and do so
much as him in a day; and folk, looking on her, foretold that she'd be
rich beyond dreams, but never know how to get a pennyworth of pleasure out
of all her money.

But Jane's one and only idol was her father, and for him she would have
done anything in her power. She counted on him being good to live for
ever, along of his cautious habits, and she'd give over all thought of any
change in the home when the crash came and the even ripple of their lives
was broke for her by a very unexpected happening.

Because, much to his own astonishment, John Warner found his mind dwelling
on a wife once more--the last thing as ever he expected to happen to him.
Indeed the discovery flustered the man not a little, and he set himself to
consider such an upheaval most careful and weigh it, as he weighed
everything, in the scales of his own future comfort and success. He was a
calculating man in all things, and yet it came over him gradual and sure
that Mrs. Bascombe had got something to her which made a most forcible
appeal and awakened fires he thought were gone out for ever when his wife
died. As for Nelly Bascombe, she was a widow and kept a shop-of-all-sorts
in Little Silver and did well thereat, and Bascombe had been dead two
years when his discovery dropped like a bolt out of a clear sky on John
Warner.

It vexed him a bit at first and he put it away, after considering what an
upstore a second wife would make in the snug and well-ordered scheme of
his existence; but there it was and Nelly wouldn't be put away. So John
examined the facts and came to the interesting conclusion that, in a
manner of speaking, his own daughter was responsible for his fix. Because,
being such a wintry fashion of female, she made all others of the sex
shine by contrast, and her father guessed it was just her manly, hard,
bustl