“No, we were talking about young Mayo marrying Damaris Scott,” returned Phineas, cheerily, “and you were saying, or intimating, that when two such poor love-sick young critters come to me and want to own the privilege of walking down life, hand in hand and heart to heart, I ought first to inventory their property and their prospects.” The waver in his voice, the depth of his significance was lost on the old man. “He gave up a good home, and where did they live the first month after they were married?” Amazeen struck his hand on his patched knee. “Where did they live, I say? In one of Bradley’s box stalls that Wat Mayo tacked burlap ’round to keep out the draughts. And they ain’t much better off now down in that Sykes’ rent, living on bannock bread and fighting wharf rats. _There’s_ one of your--“, old Ama-zeen wrinkled his nose and brought the word out of his nostrils with a sardonic twist--“_love_ matches, Phin Look, and there’s worse than that on the docket.” Amazeen stumped across the room to the front window. “Huh! That’s queer! He’s coming across the street now,” he said, with a chuckle and a wink directed at Uncle Lysimachus. Squire Phin understood why the two old men turned their backs on him, hunching their shoulders and shaking with suppressed mirth as the uncertain footsteps of Mayo blundered up the outside stairs. He was a tall and scrawny young man with black hair parted in the middle and spatted down on his head, presenting twin surfaces as shiny as the wings of a beetle. A thin moustache drooped over a weak mouth, and his eyes had that bland, vacant arch above them that irritates one’s common-sense. Stupid, smug, self-satisfied, and spoiled--the only child of the hard-working village carpenter, he had always worn better clothes than any other boy in Palermo, had never been allowed to work, and had posed as a village beau. He was just the one to attract a girl fresh from the half-penal restraint of the State industrial school and “bound out” as a drudge to a Palermo family. From the time when Phineas Look began first impatiently to notice the youth loafing along the street, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, the sight made him angry--not with the boy, but with the parents that were ruining him. Once he had bluntly pitched into Ezra Mayo, and from the indignant retorts of that fond parent discovered that he vaguely prized Watson’s stupid idleness as something aristocratic. The fact that they now referred to this marriage as they would to an especially sudden and fatal attack of the bubonic plague, and refused to admit that they still had a son, appealed to the offended lawyer by its humour rather than otherwise.