“Yes,” answered Stoke, slowly.
It is years since the loss of the Grandhaven, and her story was long ago superseded and forgotten. And the London specialist was wrong.
The Bailleres live now in the cottage westward of St. Just towards the sea, where Stoke took lodgings. It was the captain's wish to return to this remote spot. Whenever Captain Stoke is in England he spends his brief leave of absence in journeying to the forgotten mining town. Baillere passes his days in his garden or sitting on the low wall, looking with vacant eyes across the sea whereon his name was once a household word. His secret is still safe. The world still exonerates him because he was drowned.
“He sits and dreams all day,” is the report that Mary always gives to Stoke when she meets him in the town square, where the Penzance omnibus, the only link with the outer world, deposits its rare passengers.
“And you?” Stoke once asked her in a moment of unusual expansion, his deep voice half muffled with suppressed suspense.
She glanced at him with that waiting look which he knows to be there, but never meets. For he is a hard man—hard to her, harder to himself.
“I,” she said, in a low voice, “I sit beside him.”
And who shall gauge a woman's dream?