She put on her hat and dainty little Norfolk jacket of Scotch homespun, and went out with a handkerchief of his she was hemming in her pocket.
The narrow street was bathed in sunshine; at the open doors some of the fisher wives were sitting or standing at their eternal knitting, children were playing noisily in the road-way. The women, one and all, looked up and smiled as she appeared in the open doorway, and one or two little mites ran to her with the fearless joyousness which is the child's indication of love.
Leslie lifted one tiny girl with blue eyes and clustering curls and kissed her, patted the bare heads of the rest, and nodded pleasantly to the mothers.
"Mayn't we come with 'oo?" asked the mite; but Leslie shook her head.
"Not this afternoon, Trotty," she said, and ran away from them down the street which led sheer on to the beach.
As a rule she allowed the children to accompany her, and play round her as she sat at work, but this afternoon she wanted to be alone.
The arrival of the letter which her father had lost had disturbed and troubled her.
The man from whom it had come was a certain Ralph Duncombe, and he was one of the many unfortunates who had fallen in love with her; but, unlike the rest, he had not been content to take "No" for an answer, and gone away and got over it, or drowned himself, but had persisted in hoping and striving.
She had met him at a sea-side boarding house two years before this, had been pleasant and kind to him, as she was to everybody, but had meant nothing more than kindliness, and was surprised and pained when he had asked her to be his wife, and declined to take a refusal.
Since that time he had cropped up at intervals, like a tax collector, and it seemed as if Leslie would never convince him that there was no hope for him. His persistence distressed her very much, but she did not know what she could do. He was the sort of man who, having set his heart upon a thing, would work with a dogged earnestness until he had got it; and could not be made to understand that women's hearts are not to be won, like a town, by a siege, however long and stringent it may be.