“Let them go on thinking so,” said Harry at last. “Better that I should be dead to every one I know.”
“Now, Master Harry, don’t you talk like that. You don’t know what may happen next. You’re talking in the dark now. When you wake up in the sunshine to-morrow morning you’ll think quite different to this.”
“No,” he said, “I must go right away; but I shall stay in hiding here for a few days first. Will you bring me a little food from time to times unknown to any one?”
“Why of course I will, dear lad. But why don’t you put on your pea-jacket and weskit. They is dry now.”
Harry shuddered as he glanced at the rough garments the woman was turning over.
“Throw them here on the dry sand,” he said hastily. “I don’t want them now.”
“There you are then, dear lad,” said the old woman, spreading out the drowned man’s clothes; “p’r’aps they are a bit damp yet. And now I must go. There’s what’s left in the bottle, and there’s a fried mack’rel and the rest of the loaf. That’ll keep you from starving, and to-morrow night I’ll see if I can’t bring you something better.”
“And you’ll be true to me?”
“Don’t you be afraid of that,” said the old woman quietly, as Harry clasped her arm.
“Why, you are quite wet,” he said.