He interrupted himself, and in a lowered voice, “Did he ever tell you what mother died of?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Miss Bessie, bitterly; “from impatience.”
He made no sound for a while; then brusquely: “They were so afraid I would turn out badly that they fairly drove me away. Mother nagged at me for being idle, and the old man said he would cut my soul out of my body rather than let me go to sea. Well, it looked as if he would do it too—so I went. It looks to me sometimes as if I had been born to them by a mistake—in that other hutch of a house.”
“Where ought you to have been born by rights?” Bessie Carvil interrupted him, defiantly.
“In the open, upon a beach, on a windy night,” he said, quick as lightning. Then he mused slowly. “They were characters, both of them, by George; and the old man keeps it up well—don’t he? A damned shovel on the—Hark! who’s that making that row? ‘Bessie, Bessie.’ It’s in your house.”
“It’s for me,” she said, with indifference.
He stepped aside, out of the streak of light. “Your husband?” he inquired, with the tone of a man accustomed to unlawful trysts. “Fine voice for a ship’s deck in a thundering squall.”
“No; my father. I am not married.”
“You seem a fine girl, Miss Bessie, dear,” he said at once.
She turned her face away.