They made him the Lord Eastry and a Knight of the Bath, but he had had so much lead through his leg by that time, that he could never fight a ship again, so he came to the old home at Eastry to find his fourteen-year old daughter the most wonderful bit of woman's flesh in all the halls of Kent. Captain Jack and Captain Dick were never married. What children they may have had fell not into any list of the landed gentry, and so it came that the long-descended lands of the Fleets, and Admiral my Lord Eastry's prodigious coffers of prize-money must all come to Katherine Fleet, now the Lady Katherine. Now, no man that ever breathed was less of a coxcomb than Admiral Harry, but as the name of his ancient family was to pass out of the earth with his death, he looked to it that the son-in-law who succeeded to his honours and his great estate should be of such rank and fame that it might be no regret even for the Fleets of Eastry to be lost in their greater honours: some Duke it might be, or at least an Earl, whose belted ancestors had fought for the White or Red Rose; and Katherine Fleet, aged now eighteen, might have had any such an one as came within the magic of her moods. There are some women who are not completely graceful, and yet give the onlooker a great sense of satisfaction. There is a sort of wild freedom, a declaration of strength and health, an evidence of courage and high spirits, which bespeak an animal perfection too intense for the gentle ease of grace. Katherine was one of those mettlesome women who make men's blood tingle, and whose own red blood never runs cold in the direst peril. I suppose she was tall. She would have looked it had she been more than common short. She was such a noble creature, and she had the same blue eyes that were worth a dozen pikes to the Lord Eastry, when, in his old frigate days, he had jumped aboard a Frenchman and a wave had checked half his boarding party--gay blue eyes withal, that could laugh like her dimples and white teeth--gay blue eyes that could be as loving or reckless as the mobile mouth. And she had the pure curves of cheek and eyebrow which are almost necessary to beauty absolute like hers. What follows, I, Thomas Trinder, Captain retired on half-pay in His Majesty's Navy, and now of Beach Cottage, Walmer, who am writing this chronicle, had from Will the night before I led his sister to Ripple Church.