When she had gone, Mrs. Keverne stood with her arms folded and looked at him for a long time. Her mouth moved: *Jory, my lad, what have you gone and done?*
He did not know. He took the slate, and rubbed it clean with his sleeve until there was nothing on it but grey, and hung it back on its nail.
Later, crossing the yard to the ladder of the hay loft where he slept, he saw a man standing in the black mouth of the archway with his collar turned up. The light of the lamp just touched his face. It was one of the seamen who had held him—the bigger one, the one with the twisted ear. Nance, the others had called him in the taproom.
The man was not looking at the parlour windows, where the lady's candle still burned. He was looking at the loft.
When he saw Jory see him, he smiled, and touched his cap, and went away down Fore Street toward the quay.
IV.
Captain Calloway waited on her at nine o'clock precisely, shaved and brushed, with a fresh neckcloth and the air of a man who has slept well.
Marian had not slept at all. She had lain in the strange bed with the creak of moored boats coming through the window and turned the thing over until it was worn smooth. In the grey before dawn she had written two letters and torn up both. Then she had dressed in the plainest of her half-mourning, the dove-grey with the black ribbons, and had Wilmot put up her hair, and had sat down to wait.
Now she let him stand a moment longer than was polite before she asked him to sit.
"You will take coffee, Captain?"
"Thank you, no, ma'am. I breakfasted aboard." He sat, and arranged his hat on his knee. "I am at your ladyship's disposal. Mr. Ormerod will be sorry to have missed you. He writes that he will be down from Bristol today to see us off."
"Will he." She had not known that. She kept her face still. "I thought I should like to see the brig before she sails. I have never been aboard her. My husband used to take me over every new vessel the firm bought, but the Constant was bought after he died."