"A man without a head, or anything of that light sort?"
"No. There's a strange horse browsing a bit lower down," added Isaac. "Some stray animal."
The captain considered, and came to the conclusion that it could not well have been the horse. What it really was he did not conjecture.
Meanwhile Anna Chester had gone upstairs to the pleasant little room she occupied, and took off her bonnet in a maze of rapture. The world had changed into a heavenly Elysium.
[CHAPTER III.]
Isaac Thornycroft's Stratagem.
A still evening in October. The red light in the west, following on a glorious sunset, threw its last rays athwart the sea; the evening star came out in its brightness; the fishing boats were bearing steadily for home.
Captain Copp's parlour was alight with a ruddy glow; not of the sun but of the fire. It shone brightly on the captain's face, at rest now. He had put down his pipe on the hearth, after carefully knocking the smouldering ashes out, and gone quietly to sleep, his wooden leg laid fiat on an opposite chair, his other leg stretched over it. Mrs. Copp sat knitting a stocking by fire-light, her gentle face rather thoughtful; and, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the hearth-rug, reading, was Anna Chester.
She was here still. When Mary Anne Thornycroft returned to school after the summer holidays, Captain Copp had resolutely avowed Anna should stay with him. What was six weeks, he fiercely demanded, to get up a lady's health: let her stop six months, and then he'd see about it. Mrs. Copp hardly knew what to say, between her wish to keep Anna and her fear of putting the Miss Jupps to an inconvenience. "Inconvenience be shot!" politely rejoined the captain; and Mary Anne Thornycroft went back without her, bearing an explanatory and deprecatory letter.
It almost seemed to the girl that the delighted beating of her heart--at the consciousness of staying longer in the place that contained him--must be a guilty joy,--guilty because it was concealed. Certainly not from herself might come the first news of her engagement to Isaac Thornycroft: she was far too humble, too timid, to make the announcement. Truth to say, she only half believed in it: it seemed too blissful to be true. While Isaac did not proclaim it, she was quite content to let it rest a secret from the whole world. And so the months had gone on; Anna living in her paradise of happiness; Isaac making love to her privately in very fervent tenderness.