with shining faces, were looking out to sea.

Another man, a visitor from the cities of the plains, was gazing down
with appreciation at the _Mona_. There was that to his credit. His
young wife, slight and sad, and in the dress of the promenade of a
London park, was with him. She was not looking on the quickness of the
lucent tide, but at the end of a parasol, which was idly marking the
grits. I had seen the couple about the village for a week. He was big,
ruddy, middle-aged, and lusty. His neck ran straight up into his round
head, and its stiff prickles glittered like short ends of brass wire.
It was easy to guess of him, without knowing him and therefore
unfairly, that, if his wife actually confessed to him that she loved
another man, he would not have believed her; because how was it
possible for her to do that, he being what he was? His aggressive face,
and his air of confident possession, the unconscious immodesty of the
man because of his important success at some unimportant thing or
other, seemed an offence in the ancient tranquillity of that place,
where poor men acknowledged only the sea, the sun, and the winds.

I found Yeo at the end of the quay, where round the corner to seaward
open out the dunes of the opposite shore of the estuary, faint with
distance and their own pallor, and ending in the slender stalk of a
lighthouse, always quivering at the vastness of what confronts it. Yeo
was sitting on a bollard, rubbing tobacco between his palms. I told him
this was the sort of morning to get the _Mona_ out. He carefully poured
the grains into the bowl of his pipe, stoppered it, glanced slowly
about the brightness of the river mouth, and shook his head. This was a
great surprise, and anybody who did not know Yeo would have questioned
him. But it was certain he knew his business. There is not a more
deceptive and difficult stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeo
was born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in the
breeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The
soft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of a
body to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; but
when he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark and
leathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and wise, and must be
addressed with care and not as most men. He rarely smiles when a
foolish word is spoken or when he is contradicted boldly by the
innoce