The Hundredth Chance

by Ethel M. Dell

THE OFFER

In many respects the change from their lodgings up the hill to the Anchor Hotel by the fishing-quay was for the better, and as the days went on and winter drew near Maud realized this. Bunny's room had a southern aspect, and it was only on dull days that they needed a fire before evening. It possessed a French window also, which was an immense advantage; for it was perfectly easy to wheel him out on to the stone verandah outside it, and here he would lie in his own sheltered corner for hours; watching the sea and the shore and the passers-by, and sometimes talking to the very infrequent visitors who came at that season to "The Anchor."

He and Maud lived their lives apart from the rest of the establishment, an arrangement which Mrs. Sheppard deplored although she knew it to be an eminently wise one. Her husband, who never lost an opportunity to revile the girl who always treated him with the same aloof distance of manner, bitterly resented the circumstance that so limited his chances of what he styled "taking her down a peg." He hated her with the rancorous and cruel hatred of conscious inferiority, savagely repenting his undertaking to provide for her. They did not often clash because Maud steadfastly avoided him. And this also he resented, for he was in effect simply biding his time to drive her away. She was a perpetual thorn in his side, and he seized every chance that presented itself of inflicting some minor humiliation upon her. His antipathy had become almost an obsession, and he never saw her without flinging some gibing taunt in her direction.

And those taunts of his rankled deep. Maud's feelings towards him were of a very deadly order. If she had not avoided him, she knew that she could not have remained. But for Bunny's sake she endured his insults when contact with him became inevitable. She could not be separated from Bunny, and she knew of no other haven.

Towards Bunny, Sheppard displayed no ill feeling. He had small cause to do so, for the boy was kept rigorously out of his way, and his mother was more than willing to leave the entire care of him to Maud. In fact there were sometimes whole days on which she scarcely saw him. The change that Maud had foretold on her wedding-day had already begun in her. She had quitted her own world without a pang, and was sunning herself in the warmth of her husband's rough devotion. As she herself expressed it, she was getting really fond of Giles, whose brutish affection for her was patent to all.

Maud suppressed a shudder whenever she encountered any evidence of it, and as a result he was always noisier and coarser in his demonstrations before her face of white disgust. What wonder that she rigidly avoided him and insisted upon taking all her meals with Bunny?

In this way she avoided his loud-voiced friends also,--another frequent cause for offence!--all, that is, save one. That one was Jake Bolton; and, since Bunny had so decreed it, this man came and went exactly as he chose.

She never raised the smallest objection to his presence, but she certainly never welcomed him. In fact she generally took advantage of his coming to leave Bunny for a space and it even became a recognized thing between them that she should avail herself of the leisure thus provided to run down to the shore for the brief recreation which was never obtainable in any other way.

Very often she would not return until after Jake's departure, and so on the whole, though they met so frequently, she actually saw but little of him. He was Bunny's pal, and--obedient to the inner warning--she was firmly determined that he should never become hers.

He did not seem inclined to combat this determination, but on the other hand he never relinquished by a hair's breadth the position he had taken up at the beginning of their acquaintance. It was impossible to snub him. He never heard a snub. He never advanced, and he never retreated. He simply stood firm, so that after a time her uneasiness began to die down almost in spite of her, and she even came to look upon him in a very guarded way as a friend in need. He could do anything in the world with Bunny, and though she was half-suspicious of his influence she could not deny that he invariably exercised it in the right direction. He had even begun to implant in Bunny a wholly novel and sometimes almost disconcerting consideration for herself. Bunny was more tractable just then than he had ever been before. It was the only bright spot in her sky.