“It’s true,” she murmured to herself.

“And that’s about as far as it goes. He was always one of your domestic characters. Why, I remember how he used to go about looking very sick for three days before he had to leave home on one of his trips to South Shields for coal. He had a standing charter from the gas-works. You would think he was off on a whaling cruise—three years and a tail. Ha, ha! Not a bit of it. Ten days on the outside. The Skimmer of the Seas was a smart craft. Fine name, wasn’t it? Mother’s uncle owned her….”

He interrupted himself, and in a lowered voice, “Did he ever tell you what mother died of?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Miss Bessie, bitterly; “from impatience.”

He made no sound for a while; then brusquely: “They were so afraid I would turn out badly that they fairly drove me away. Mother nagged at me for being idle, and the old man said he would cut my soul out of my body rather than let me go to sea. Well, it looked as if he would do it too—so I went. It looks to me sometimes as if I had been born to them by a mistake—in that other hutch of a house.”

“Where ought you to have been born by rights?” Bessie Carvil interrupted him, defiantly.

“In the open, upon a beach, on a windy night,” he said, quick as lightning. Then he mused slowly. “They were characters, both of them, by George; and the old man keeps it up well—don’t he? A damned shovel on the—Hark! who’s that making that row? ‘Bessie, Bessie.’ It’s in your house.”

“It’s for me,” she said, with indifference.

He stepped aside, out of the streak of light. “Your husband?” he inquired, with the tone of a man accustomed to unlawful trysts. “Fine voice for a ship’s deck in a thundering squall.”

“No; my father. I am not married.”

“You seem a fine girl, Miss Bessie, dear,” he said at once.

She turned her face away.

“Oh, I say,—what’s up? Who’s murdering him?”

“He wants his tea.” She faced him, still and tall, with averted head, with her hands hanging clasped before her.

“Hadn’t you better go in?” he suggested, after watching for a while the nape of her neck, a patch of dazzling white skin and soft shadow above the sombre line of her shoulders. Her wrap had slipped down to her elbows. “You’ll have all the town coming out presently. I’ll wait here a bit.”

Her wrap fell to the ground, and he stooped to pick it up; she had vanished. He threw it over his arm, and approaching the window squarely he saw a monstrous form of a fat man in an armchair, an unshaded lamp, the yawning of an enormous mouth in a big flat face encircled by a ragged halo of hair—Miss Bessie’s head and bust. The shouting stopped; the blind ran down. He lost himself in thinking how awkward it was. Father mad; no getting into the house. No money to get back; a hungry chum in London who would begin to think he had been given the go-by. “Damn!” he muttered. He could break the door in, certainly; but they would perhaps bundle him into chokey for that without asking questions—no great matter, only he was confoundedly afraid of being locked up, even in mistake. He turned cold at the thought. He stamped his feet on the sodden grass.

“What are you?—a sailor?” said an agitated voice.