ps only. Her home delights
had been confined to the nursing of her father during the ten best years
of her life.

A bestial roaring coming out of an upstairs window would interrupt their
talk. She would begin at once to roll up her crochet-work or fold her
sewing, without the slightest sign of haste. Meanwhile the howls and
roars of her name would go on, making the fishermen strolling upon the
sea-wall on the other side of the road turn their heads towards the
cottages. She would go in slowly at the front door, and a moment
afterwards there would fall a profound silence. Presently she would
reappear, leading by the hand a man, gross and unwieldy like a
hippopotamus, with a bad-tempered, surly face.

He was a widowed boat-builder, whom blindness had overtaken years before
in the full flush of business. He behaved to his daughter as if she
had been responsible for its incurable character. He had been heard to
bellow at the top of his voice, as if to defy Heaven, that he did not
care: he had made enough money to have ham and eggs for his breakfast
every morning. He thanked God for it, in a fiendish tone as though he
were cursing.

Captain Hagberd had been so unfavourably impressed by his tenant, that
once he told Miss Bessie, "He is a very extravagant fellow, my dear."

She was knitting that day, finishing a pair of socks for her father, who
expected her to keep up the supply dutifully. She hated knitting,
and, as she was just at the heel part, she had to keep her eyes on her
needles.

"Of course it isn't as if he had a son to provide for," Captain
Hagberd went on a little vacantly. "Girls, of course, don't require so
much--h'm-h'm. They don't run away from home, my dear."

"No," said Miss Bessie, quietly.

Captain Hagberd, amongst the mounds of turned-up earth, chuckled. With
his maritime rig, his weather-beaten face, his beard of Father Neptune,
he resembled a deposed sea-god who had exchanged the trident for the
spade.

"And he must look upon you as already provided for, in a manner. That's
the best of it with the girls. The husbands..." He winked. Miss
Bessie, absorbed in her knitting, coloured faintly.

"Bessie! my hat!" old Carvil bellowed out suddenly. He had been sitting
under the tree mute and motionless, like an idol of some remarkably
monstrous superstition. He never opened his mouth but to howl for her,
at her, sometimes about her; and then he did not moderate the terms of
his abuse. Her system was