"How you talk!" declared Mrs. Jackson indignantly. "Who wants to meddle? As if one couldn't take a bit of interest in one's own visitors! There's the drawin'-room a-ringin', and the dinin'-room will be wantin' its tea. Stir the fire, Joe, and hold the toast whilst I answer the bell. Where's that Polly a-gone to, I wonder?"
In spite of her husband's disdainful comments, Mrs. Jackson's surmises were not altogether groundless; and if she had peeped into her back sitting-room that evening, when Isobel was in bed, she might have seen her visitor slowly and with much care and thought composing a letter. Sheet after sheet of notepaper was covered, and then torn up, for the writer's efforts did not seem to satisfy her, and she leaned her head on her hand every now and then with a weary air, as if she had undertaken a distasteful task.
"I do not ask anything for myself," wrote Mrs. Stewart at last. "That you should care to meet me, or ever become reconciled to me, is, I know, beyond all question. My one request is that you will see your grandchild. She is now nearly eleven years of age, a thorough Stewart, tall and fair, and with so strong a resemblance to her father that you cannot fail to see the likeness. I have done my utmost for her, but I am not able to give her the advantages I should wish her to have, and which, as her father's child, I feel it is hard for her to lack. She is named Isobel, after your only daughter, the little sister whose loss my husband always spoke of with so much regret, and whom he hoped she might resemble. You would find her truthful, straightforward, obedient, and well-behaved, and in every respect worthy of the name of Stewart. It is with the greatest difficulty that I bring myself to ask of you any favour, but for the sake of the one, dear to us both, who is gone, I beg that you will at least see my Isobel, and judge her for yourself."
She addressed the letter to Colonel Stewart, the Chase, sealed it, stamped it, and took it herself to the post. For a moment she stood and hesitated—a moment in which she seemed almost inclined to draw back after all; she turned the letter over doubtfully in her hand, went a step away, then suddenly straightening herself with an air of firm determination, she dropped it into the pillar-box and returned to her lodgings. Going upstairs to the bedroom, she tenderly lifted the soft golden hair, and looked at the quiet, sleeping face of her little girl.
"He cannot fail to like her," she said to herself. "It was the only right thing to do, and what he would have wished. I'm glad I have had the courage to make the attempt. He will surely acknowledge her now, and my one prayer is that he will not take her away from me."
CHAPTER III.
A MEETING ON THE SANDS.
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet."
THE little town of Silversands was built on the cliffs by the sea, so close over the greeny-blue water that the dash of the waves was always in your ears and the taste of the salt spray on your lips. The picturesque thatched fishermen's cottages lay scattered one above another down the steep hillside at such strange and irregular angles that the narrow streets which led from the quay wound in and out like a maze, and you found your way to the shore down flights of wide steps under low archways, or by a pathway cut through your neighbour's cabbage patch. It was not difficult to guess the occupation of most of the inhabitants, for fishing-nets of all descriptions might be seen hanging out to dry over every available railing; great flat skates and conger eels were nailed to the doorways to be cured in the sun; rosy-faced women appeared to be eternally washing blue jerseys, which fluttered like flags from the various little gardens; and the bare-headed, brown-legged children who gathered cockles on the sands, or angled for crabs from the jetty, seemed as much at home in the water as on dry land. The harbour was decidedly fishy; bronzed burly seamen were perpetually unloading cargoes of herrings which they stowed away into barrels, or lobsters that were carefully packed in baskets to be dispatched to the neighbouring towns. There was a kind of open-air market, fitted up with rickety stalls where you might buy fresh cod and mackerel still alive and shining with all the lovely fleeting colours which fade so quickly when they are taken from the water. You could afford to be extravagant in the way of shell-fish, if you liked such delicacies, since a large red cotton pocket-handkerchief full of cockles and mussels only cost a penny, and whelks and periwinkles sold at a halfpenny the pint.
At high water the quay was always agog with excitement, the coming in of the boats being accompanied with that hauling of ropes, creaking of windlasses, shouting of hoarse voices and general confusion both among toiling workers and idle loungers that seem inseparable from the business of a port, while the occasional advent of an excursion steamer was an event which attracted every looker-on in the harbour. All the talk at Silversands was of tides and storms, of good or bad catches, the luck of one vessel or the ill-fortune of another, and to the fisher-folk the affairs of the empire were of small importance compared with the arrival and departure of the herring-fleet. The schools gave a thin veneer of education, but it seemed to vanish away directly with the contact of the waves, so that the customs and modes of thought of most of the people differed little from those of their forefathers who slept, some in the churchyard on the edge of the cliff, with quaint epitaphs to record their virtues, and some in those deeper graves over which no stones could be reared.