head was bowed in one night more than in all the years I had known him. But they were both as grave and steady as the sea itself, then lying beneath a dark sky, waveless — yet with a heavy roll upon it, as if it breathed in its rest — and touched, on the horizon, with a strip of silvery light from the unseen sun.

‘We have had a mort of talk, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty to me, when we had all three walked a little while in silence, ‘of what we ought and doen’t ought to do.

But we see our course now.’

I happened to glance at Ham, then looking out to sea upon the distant light, and a frightful thought came into my mind — not that his face was angry, for it was not; I recall nothing but an expression of stern determination in it —