“O’ what?”

“O’ the child at Comfort Harbour, Bessie, that starved in his mother’s arms.”

Timmie Lovejoy threw more billets on the fire. They flamed and spluttered and filled the room with cheerful light.

“Davy,” said the doctor, “we can never cure the wretchedness of this coast.”

“No, zur?”

“But we can try to mitigate it.”

“We’ll try,” said I. “You an’ me.”

“You and I.”

“And I,” my sister said.

Lying between the sturdy little twins, that night—where by right of caste I lay, for it was the warmest place in the bed—I abandoned, once and for all, my old hope of sailing a schooner, with the decks awash.