He would have nothing stronger than ale; and while it was being brought, and being warmed at the fire, he sat thinking. There was a fine, massive gravity in his face, I did not venture to disturb.

‘When she was a child,’ he said, lifting up his head soon after we were left alone, ‘she used to talk to me a deal about the sea, and about them coasts where the sea got to be dark blue, and to lay a-shining and a-shining in the sun. I thowt, odd times, as her father being drownded made her think on it so much.

I doen’t know, you see, but maybe she believed — or hoped — he had drifted out to them parts, where the flowers is always a-blowing, and the country bright.’

‘It is likely to have been a childish fancy,’