"Yes--that's my marriage. There ain't much more to tell. I was for going to Canada, and started unknown with fifty pounds of money, which was all I kept. I was going to get a state-aided passage from London and begin again out there. It sounds a big thing to fling over the whole of your life, like as if you was taking off a suit of old clothes; but it didn't seem big to me then--only natural and proper. I comed even to like it. But chance willed different, and the accident of meeting a stranger in the train kept me in England after all. Chance done me a very good turn then. A farmer got in the train at Taunton and between Taunton and Bath, fate, or what you like to call it, willed I went to that man. We got talking, and I told him I was going abroad, being skilful at cows and the butter and milk business. He got interested at that and reckoned I might be such a man as he needed; but I said plainly that I was cutting losses, and my past must bide out of sight, and I'd best to go foreign in my opinion. By that time, however, he'd got a fancy he'd trust me. He was a very good man and a judge of character, which most good men are not in my experience. I found after that he was a rare sort of chap--the best and truest friend to me--such a man as inclined me slowly to think the better of the world again. He only asked me one question and that was if, on my honour, I could tell him I'd done no dishonest or wicked thing from which I was trying to escape. And I swore by God I had not. He believed me, and when, a day or two later, I told him the whole story, he didn't say whether in his judgment I'd done right or wrong, but he granted that I'd done right from my point of view and thought no worse of me for it. I hesitated a bit at his offer; but I liked him, somehow, from the first, and I was cruel tired, and the thought of getting to work right away was good to me. Because I knew by then that there was nothing like working your fingers to the bone to dull pain of mind and make you sleep. "My life with him is another tale. I look back upon it with nothing but content. I did well by him, and he was as good as a father to me. It's near eighteen months ago he died, and his two sons carried on. Very nice men, and they wanted me to stop; but I couldn't bide when the old chap dropped out. He left me two hundred pounds under his will, Dinah; and his sons didn't object that I should take it, for they were well-to-do and liked me. Then I saw Joe's advertisement in the paper and had a fancy to come back alongside where I was born." "And Mrs. Maynard never found you?" "No; but she isn't Mrs. Maynard. Maynard's not my name and Lawrence ain't my name." She sighed. "Man!" she said, "you be sinking and sinking--oh, my God, you be sinking out of my sight! I thought you was one creature, and now you be turning into a far-away thing under my eyes."