the existence of injury. Captain Phippeny
was one of those sailors whom the change of scene, the wide knowledge of
men and of things, the hardships and dangers of a sea life, broaden and
render tolerant and somewhat wise. Pember had been brutalized by these
same things.

The inhabitants of Grayhead were distinguished by the breadth and
suggestiveness of their profanity, and Captain Pember had been a past
master of the accomplishment. Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley could have
been no more discriminating than the local acknowledgment of his
proficiency in this line. No wonder Mrs. Pember looked back at the ten
years of her married life with a shudder. With the rigid training of
her somewhat dogmatic communion still potent, she listened in a
horrified expectancy, rather actual than figurative, for the heavens to
strike or the earth to swallow up her nonchalant husband. Nor was this
all. The weakness for grog, unfortunately supposed to be inherent in a
nautical existence, was carried by Captain Pember to an extent
inconsiderate even in the eyes of a seafaring public; and when, under
its genial influence, he knocked his wife down and tormented Mellony,
the opinion of this same public declared itself on the side of the
victims with a unanimity which is not always to be counted upon in such
cases.

In fact, her married life had, as it were, formalized many hitherto
somewhat vague details of Mrs. Pember's conception of the place of
future punishment; and when her husband died in an appropriate and
indecorous fashion as the result of a brawl, he continued to mitigate
the relief of the event by leaving in his wife's heart a haunting fear,
begotten of New England conscientiousness, that perhaps she ought not to
be so unmistakably glad of it. It was thus that, with Mellony's growth
from childhood to womanhood, the burning regret for her former unmarried
state, whose difficulties had been mainly theological, had become a no
less burning resolve that her child should never suffer as she had
suffered, but should be guarded from matrimony as from death. That she
failed to distinguish between individuals, that she failed to see that
young Baldwin was destitute of those traits which her sharpened vision
would now have detected in Pember's youth, was both the fault of her
perceptive qualities and the fruit of her impregnable resolve. She had
been hurt by Mellony's rebellion, but not influenced by so much as a
hair's-breadth.

Early o