understand something of the male animal and his passions.
In those days I must have been--or so it strikes me, looking back--a
sort of plain-featured Diana; 'chaste huntress'--isn't that what they
called her? At any rate, the story shocked, even sickened, me a little
at the time. . . . It appears that the night before making Plymouth
Sound he made a bet in the wardroom--a bet of fifty pounds--that he'd
marry the first woman he met ashore. Pretty mad, was it not?--even for
a youngster coming home penniless, with no prospects, and to a home he
hated; for his father and mother were dead, and he and his elder brother
Anthony had never been able to hit it off. . . . On the whole, you may
say he got better than he deserved. For some reason or other they
halted the _Pegasus_ outside the Hamoaze--dropped anchor in Cawsand Bay,
in fact; and there, getting leave for shore, the young fool met his fate
on Cawsand quay. She was a coast-guard's daughter--a decent girl, I've
heard, and rather strikingly handsome. I'll leave it to you what he
might have found if he'd happened to land at Plymouth. . . . He got more
than half-drunk that night; but a day or two later, when the ship was
paid off, he went back from Plymouth to Cawsand, and within a week he
had married her. Then it turned out that fate had been nursing its
stroke. At Sidmouth, on the second day of the honeymoon, a redirected
telegram reached him, and he learnt that by Anthony's death Meriton was
his, and the title with it. He left his bride at once, and posted up to
Meriton for the funeral, arriving just in time; and there I saw him, for
we all happened to be at Culvercoombe for the shooting, and women used
to attend funerals in those days. . . . No one knew of the marriage; but
that same evening he rode over to Culvercoombe, asked for a word with me
in private, and told me the whole story--pluckily enough, I am bound to
say. God knows what I had expected those words in private to be; and
perhaps in the revulsion of learning the truth I lashed out on him.
. . . Yes, I had a tongue in those days--have still, for that matter;
not a doubt but I made him feel it. The world, you see, seemed at an
end for both of us. I had no mother to help me, and my brother
Elphinstone's best friend wouldn't call him the man to advise in such a
business. Moreover, where was the use of advice? The thing was done,
past undoing. . . Oh," Miss Sally went on, "you are not to think I
brok