When Bride had exhausted her eloquence upon the farmer, and he had gone out to his work again, she tried what she could do with the daughter; but Genefer was even more impracticable than her father. Half ashamed of ever having given encouragement to Saul, who had behaved so cavalierly to her afterwards, she was bitterly set against him, and did not pick her words when launching forth about him. Moreover, Genefer was now openly betrothed in marriage to young Farmer Hewett, and was mortally afraid lest he should ever hear that she had permitted Saul to make love to her. She would not for anything in the world have had him again at the farm, and Bride was forced to ride away downcast and sorrowful, wondering in her heart how it was that people of the same class were so hard upon one another, and musing by degrees on the result to the community of a gradual change which should practically throw the governing power into the hands of the masses. Would that power be exercised on the side of mercy and love, or would it become only a new form of tyranny and hardness, far more difficult to modify and soften than any monarchical harshness of rule? It was a question she could not answer, but it helped to keep her face grave and her brow sad as she rode slowly down the hill, rode right down by the rough lane to the cottages upon the shore, where she had an errand of mercy to perform; and leaving her pony to nibble at the salt herbage at the base of the rocks, as he loved to do, she walked forward alone towards the margin of the sea, and came suddenly and quite unexpectedly face to face with Saul Tresithny, who was sitting in the hot sunshine on a rock, and gazing out over the sea, with those strange dark eyes of his that gleamed with sombre fire. She knew that he was free, but thought him still at Pentreath, he having refused to come to his grandfather’s cottage on his release. The recognition was mutual, and the man instinctively, though sullenly, rose to his feet. Bride glanced up at the tall towering figure, which looked taller than before in the gauntness of recent illness. There was something rather terrible in the gloom of the cadaverous face. Saul had been stricken down with that terrible fever which was so common in prisons during the previous century, and went by the significant name of jail-fever, and which still lingered about those prisons which were overcrowded or unsanitary, and generally claimed for its victims those who were unused to confinement and a close atmosphere, and had led an open-air life hitherto.