As a matter of fact, she could hardly have made a better choice. The sailor, who bore a most human love to his kind, had appraised many men and women in his time, and he had a vast admiration for Granny. Gallant himself, to the core of his simple soul, he loved the quality in others, and the story of her fight with circumstances and final mastery of them had struck him in a sensitive place. On that memorable day on which she had seen him in uniform he was returning from Aberdeen, where he had gone to meet an official person, and his chaise passed her cottage. As he drove by, he saw the little upright figure standing on the doorstep, and, remembering her history, with a sudden impulse, he raised his hand and saluted her. Though he was not, perhaps, so renowned a warrior as the Queen of the Cadgers supposed, Captain Somerville had seen a good deal of service, and had lost his leg, not in the doing of any melodramatic act, but in the ordinary course of a very steadily and efficiently performed duty. As a boy, he had gone to sea when the sea was a harder profession than it is now and when parents had had to think, not twice but many times, before committing their sons to it. He had run away and smuggled himself upon a merchantman lying in the harbour near his home, and before she sailed, he had been discovered by the first mate. His irate father, to whom he was returned, thinking to cure him of an infatuation he could not, himself, understand, arranged with the captain that he should be taken on the voyage--which was a short one--and made to work hard. ‘It would show the young fool,’ he said, ‘that the Church’--for which he was destined--‘was a more comfortable place than a ship.’ But the treatment produced an exactly contrary result. Finally, the family three-decker received the person of a younger brother, and, after much discussion, His Majesty’s Navy that of a new midshipman. More than fifteen years afterwards he got into a young man’s scrape in an obscure seaport, and emerged from it with Mrs. Somerville in tow. It was one from which a less honourable man would have escaped more fortunately. The lady was accustomed to say, in after times, that she had been ‘married from the schoolroom,’ but many who heard her suspected that there had never been a schoolroom in the matter. He had now been Coastguard Inspector at Kaims for over seven years. The sailor was sitting at the breakfast-table next morning opposite to his wife, portions of whose figure were visible behind the urn; Miss Lucilla was away on a visit. The house stood a little back from the High Street, and, though the room was quiet, a cart which had stopped at the foot of the strip of garden was unnoticed by the pair. ‘If ye please,’ said the parlour-maid, looking in, ‘there’s a fishwife wad like to speak wi’ you.’ ‘We require nothing to-day,’ said Mrs. Somerville. ‘She’s no sellin’. She’s just needing a word wi’ the Captain. It’s Mrs. Stirk--her that bides out by Garviekirk.’