for a while. And he used to go out fishin' wi' my father,
and Daddy, he was lame, so Pierre used to take the fish round and do
jobs with the boats for him, and this and that, so as Daddy thought a
rare lot o' him; and when he seed we was thinkin' o' each other, he sort
o' thought he'd leave the business to him and me, and we'd be able to
keep him when he got too old to go out any more. And all was goin'
right, when one day Pierre says to me, would I go out in the boat and
row with him to the village, as he'd got a creel of crabs to take round,
so I got in and we rowed: and we went through the Devil's Drift, and he
says to me sudden like, 'When we're man and wife, Marie, what'll your
father do to keep hisself?' 'Keep hisself,' I said, 'why ain't we agoin'
to keep him?' And then he began such a palaver about a man bein' bound
to keep his wife but not his father-in-law, and it not bein' fit for
three grown people to live in one room, as if my father and mother and
his father afore him and all his brothers and sisters hadn't lived in
this very room that now I lie a-dyin' in; and I said 'well, as I see it,
if you take Daddy's custom off of him, you're bound to keep Daddy.' And
he said that wasn't his way o' lookin' at it, and I went into a sudden
anger, and declared I wouldn't have nought to do with a man that could
treat my Daddy so, and he was just turning the boat round to go into the
Drift, and there came such an evil look in his eyes so as it seemed to
go through my bones like a knife, and he said 'You shall repent this one
day--you and your daddy too,' and I said not another word and he began
to row forwards through the Devil's Drift. And somehow bein' there alone
with him in that fearsome place, when a foot's error one side or the
other may mean instant death, as he sat facin' me I seemed to see the
black heart of him, as I'd never seen it before, and there was summat
came over me and made me feel my life was in his hands, in the hands of
my enemy.

"Well, I said no more to him, not one word good or bad, the rest of that
evenin's row, and I never went out with him no more. But now, Father,
this is what I want to say--for my breath is a goin' from me every
minute--my Daddy, he was like my child to me, me that have never had a
child of my own. I had watched him and cared for him as if I was his
mother, 'stead of his bein' my father, and a hurt to him was like a hurt
to me: and when that man talked o' leavin' him to fend