And Joan trusted her daughter--she scouted the idea of Denas doing anything that was outside her mother's approval. She told John that his fear was nothing but the natural conceit of men; they thought a woman could not be with one of their sex and not be ready to sacrifice her own life and the lives of all her kinsfolk for him. "It be such puddling folly to start with," she said indignantly; "talking about Denas being false to her father and mother! 'Tis a doleful, dismal, ghastly bit of cowardice, John. Dreadful! aw, dreadful!" Then John was silent, but he communed with his own heart. Joan had not seen Roland and Denas as he had seen them; no one had troubled Joan as he had been troubled. For something often gives to a loving heart a kind of prescience, when it may be used for wise and saving ends; and John Penelles divined the angry trend of Roland's thoughts, though it was impossible for him to anticipate the special form that trend would take. Roland had indeed been made furiously angry at the interference between himself and Denas. "I spoke pleasantly to the old fisher, and he was as rude as could be. Rude to me! Jove! I'll teach him the value of good manners to his betters." He sat down on a lichen-covered rock, lit a cigar, and began to think. His personal dignity had been deeply wounded; his pride of petty caste trod upon. He, a banker's son, had been snubbed by a common fisherman! "He took Denas from me as if I was going to kill her, body and soul. He deserves all he suspected me of." And as these and similar thoughts passed through Roland's mind he was not at all handsome; his face looked dark and drawn and marked all over with the characters sin writes through long late hours of selfish revelry and riot. But however his angry thoughts wandered, they always came back to the slight of himself personally--to the failure of Penelles to appreciate the honour he was doing him in wooing his daughter. And if the devil wishes to enter easily a man or a woman, he finds no door so wide and so easy of access as the door of wounded vanity and wounded self-esteem. Roland's first impulse was to make Denas pay her father's debt. "I will never speak to her again. Common little fisher-girl! I will teach her that gentlemen are to be used like gentlemen. Why did she not speak up to her father? She stood there without a word and let him snub me. The idea!" These exclamations were, however, only the quick, unreasoning passion of the animal; when Roland had calmed himself with tobacco, he felt how primitive and foolish they were. His reflections were then of a different character; they began to flow steadily into a channel they had often wandered in, though hitherto without distinct purpose.