ke.

Roland had indeed been made furiously angry at the interference
between himself and Denas. "I spoke pleasantly to the old fisher, and
he was as rude as could be. Rude to me! Jove! I'll teach him the value
of good manners to his betters."

He sat down on a lichen-covered rock, lit a cigar, and began to think.
His personal dignity had been deeply wounded; his pride of petty caste
trod upon. He, a banker's son, had been snubbed by a common
fisherman! "He took Denas from me as if I was going to kill her, body
and soul. He deserves all he suspected me of." And as these and
similar thoughts passed through Roland's mind he was not at all
handsome; his face looked dark and drawn and marked all over with the
characters sin writes through long late hours of selfish revelry and
riot.

But however his angry thoughts wandered, they always came back to the
slight of himself personally--to the failure of Penelles to appreciate
the honour he was doing him in wooing his daughter. And if the devil
wishes to enter easily a man or a woman, he finds no door so wide and
so easy of access as the door of wounded vanity and wounded
self-esteem.

Roland's first impulse was to make Denas pay her father's debt. "I
will never speak to her again. Common little fisher-girl! I will teach
her that gentlemen are to be used like gentlemen. Why did she not
speak up to her father? She stood there without a word and let him
snub me. The idea!" These exclamations were, however, only the quick,
unreasoning passion of the animal; when Roland had calmed himself with
tobacco, he felt how primitive and foolish they were. His reflections
were then of a different character; they began to flow steadily into a
channel they had often wandered in, though hitherto without distinct
purpose.

"After all, I like the girl. She has a kind of nixie, tantalising,
bewitching charm that would drive a crowd mad. She has a fresh,
sympathetic voice, penetrating, too, as a clarion. Her folk-songs and
her sea-songs go down to the bottom of a man's heart and into every
corner of it. Now, if I could get her to London and have her taught
how to manage her voice and face and person, if I had her taught how
to dance--Jove! there is a fortune in it! Dressed in a fancy fisher
costume, singing the casting songs and the boat songs--the calls and
takes she knows so well--why, she would make a gas-lit theatre seem
like the great ocean, and men would see the white-sailed ships go
ma