“Yes, that I am going to the parson to have my banns called.” “Who is it?” she asked, looking at him, her weeping arrested, and she as one of stone. “If I say it shall be you, what will you say?” She tried to speak, could not, turned, put up her hand against the wall, brushed it down once, twice, again, impatiently. She could not bring the word out that she wished to say. Will remained waiting. No answer came. “Ciss,” he said, “it shall _not_ be you. Any other rather. No—you, never!” Then he turned and left the back kitchen. She stood for a moment watching him as he departed. Then she leaned her face in her wet hands and burst into convulsive weeping. Snap. Wee! wee! wee! A rat was caught. II Will Swan did not go to America. What he did was to find an engagement on a small boat that went to and from Bristol, bringing groceries, earthenware, timber, ovens from Bridgewater, and which conveyed slates from the Cornish quarries to that great mercantile city which goes on building, building without ceasing. He was away sometimes for a week; sometimes for a fortnight; now and then for over a month. America! He was not going to expatriate himself for a woman’s sake, when there was plenty of work to be found in his native land, or rather, on the seas that washed it. The Bristol Channel looks upon the map as though in it could be only calm water, as in the estuary of the Thames. It is, however, not so. When the wind blows from the west, how the great Atlantic billows roll in, and with what fury do they recoil and strike the faces of their brother waves also seeking an entrance! They tread one another down; they overleap one another; they beat one another about, and leave a long line of foam down the centre of the Channel, the dust and wreckage of ten thousand broken waves. And then, without. When Hartland Point has been turned, what a coast! The iron-black frowning cliffs stand up sheer from deep sea, and seem to say, “We look on all passers-by as foes; let none venture to approach us!” And how the Atlantic billows heave there! It is no exaggeration to say that they run mountains high. Woe to the vessel, great or small, that enters or attempts to cross the great loop between Hartland and Trevose. It is a mouth to champ up and suck the life out of every boat that falls into it when the wind is inland. Cicely heard that Will Swan had not gone to the States. She saw him occasionally in church, but when there he never looked her way. He stood up straight as a post, sang with lungs like the bellows of a blacksmith, in his blue jersey, his face brown as a coffee-berry fresh roasted, but his eye, blue as the summer sea, flashed and twinkled, but never on her.