He reached the entrance-gate. As it clashed behind him, two children at play in the garden lifted their heads. The girl whispered to the boy, and the pair stole away out of sight. From the porch the small greyhound caught sight of him, and, bounding to him, fawned about his feet. In the counting-house he found his sister closeted with Mr. Benny, and a pile of bills on the table between. Mrs. Purchase rose and greeted him with a little pecking kiss. She was a cheerful body, by some five or six years his junior, with a handsome weather-tanned face, eyes wrinkled at the corners like a seaman's, and two troubles in the world—the first being that she had borne no children. She shared her husband's voyaging, kept the ship's accounts, was known to all on board as "The Bos'un," and when battened under hatches in foul weather spent her time in trimming the most wonderful bonnets. Her coquetry stopped short at bonnets. To-day indeed—the weather being warm—in lieu of bodice she had slipped on a grey alpaca coat of her husband's.
"Good-evening, John!" She plunged at once into a narrative of the passage home—how they had picked up a slant off Heligoland and carried it with them well past the Wight; how on this side of Portland they had met with slight and baffling head-winds, and for two days had done little more than drift with the tides. The vessel was foul with weed, and must go into dock. "You could graze a cow on her for a fortnight," Mrs. Purchase declared. "Benny and I have just finished checking the bills. You'd like to run through them?"
"Let be," said Rosewarne. "I'll cast an eye over them to-night maybe." He stepped to the bell-rope and rang for his jug of cider.
Some touch of fatigue in the movement, some slight greyness in his face, caught Mrs. Purchase's sisterly eye.
"It's my belief you're unwell, John."
"Weary, my dear Hannah—weary; that's all." He turned to the little clerk. "That will do for to-night, Benny. You can leave all the papers as they are, just putting these bills together in a heap. Is that the correspondence? Very well; I'll deal with it."
"In all my life I never heard you own to feeling tired," persisted Mrs. Purchase, as Mr. Benny closed the door behind him. "You may take my word for it, you're unwell; been sleeping in some damp bed, belike."
Rosewarne moved to the window and gazed out across the garden. Down by the yew-hedge, where a narrow path of turf wound in and out among beds of tall Madonna lilies and Canterbury bells, the two children were playing a solemn game of follow-my-leader, the blind boy close on his sister's heels, she turning again and again to watch that he came to no harm.
"I wonder if that boy could be trained and made fit for something?" mused Rosewarne aloud.
"Eh? Is it Clem?" She had followed and stood now by his elbow. "My dear man, he has the brains of the family! Leave Myra to teach him for a while. See how she's teaching him now, although she doesn't know it; and that goes on from morning to night."