“So when Lizzie asked Nunan if he wasn’t the handsome gipsy’s husband, there was John Broadwood shaking a great fist with a blue anchor on it over Lizzie’s shoulder, and Willie making foolish shapes with his mouth without a sound, and Jemmy Wild hawking in his throat and knocking his pipe out noisily; ... but Nunan popped out with it--about Osa and the guns at Portsannet, and so on--and then he spluttered out a ‘Hey! Would ye do that, man?’ You see, Willie had clapped his hand over his mouth, and there was a wicked gleam in Nunan’s eyes, and his hand went to the small of his back where the knife was; and that’s all about the knife, except that the woman told Nunan to sit still. “But Lizzie was trembling pitifully; and when I saw her eyes go round the men I backed away behind the settle, so that somebody else might tell her. Then her head came down on her arms and thumped on the table, while Nunan sulked. We watched her broad back heaving; and then all at once she threw up her head. ‘Oh, hear it goyling down th’ chimley!’ she cried; and I saw John Broadwood biting his pipe hard; ‘Frank--Frank o’ th’ _Lizzie Martin_--ye were his mates, and here ye sit--he called her after me--she were Lizzie Martin afore I were--I were Lizzie Collison o’ th’ Heights----’ ...Broadwood bade her Whisht! whisht! but she went on. ‘It were a Valentine’s day, a Thursday, and he came into th’ kitchen that morning--Jess never barked when he came courting, but she’d never let him go without I took him to th’ gate----’ ...And so on, young gentlemen. Lizzie and Frank had seen the valentine from the top of the hill, on the sea below, as if on a sheet of glass. ‘Don’t, Lizzie!’ says Broadwood, choking; ‘we can’t bide to hear ye!’... “John Broadwood was a fine, independent, self-sufficient sort of fellow, with a good deal of John Broadwood about him altogether, but he broke down. Lizzie’s eyes, wandering wildly, fell on the gipsy woman and the babe. The gipsy’s husband, for anything we knew, was in peril too; but I think it was something else that came over Lizzie--the sight of the child: I see you understand. She sobbed something;--I didn’t hear what--and the gipsy woman turned, quite unmoved, and looked at Lizzie from head to heel. ‘I see your time’s coming,’ she said, ‘and them that lives in chambers of stone need comfort; come then.’ And with that she moved the babe in the sling, and produced an old pack of cards. Strange folk....