He was a stoutly-built man, short and gross, with heavy black eyebrows, thick and threatening lips, a lowering expression, and a loud and growling voice. Seeing the girl at her meal he went over to the ingle and stood with his back to the fire, and his big hands behind him, while he fell on her with scorching sarcasm. "Well! Well!" he said. "Back again, I see! And you such a grand woman grown since you were sitting and eating on that seat before. Only sixteen years for Spring, yet sooreying (sweet-hearting) already, I hear! With no wooden-spoon man neither, like your father--your stepfather, I mane! The son and heir of one of the big ones of the island, they're telling me! And yet you're not thinking mane of coming back to the house of a common man like me! Wonderful! Wonderful!" Bessie felt as if her bread-and-butter were choking her, but Dan, whose impure mind was not satisfied with the effect of his sarcasm, began to lay out at her with a bludgeon. "You fool!" he said. "You've been mixing yourself up with bad doings on the road, and now a dacent lad is lying at death's door through you, and the High Bailiff is after flinging you out of his house as unfit for his family--that's it, isn't it?" Bessie had dropped her head on the table, but Mrs. Collister's frightened face was gathering a look of courage. "Aisy, man veen, aisy," said the mother. "Take care of thy tongue, Dan." "My tongue?" said Dan. "It's my character I have to take care of, woman. When a girl is carrying a man's name that has no legal claim to it, he has a right to do that, I'm thinking." "But the girl's only a child--only a child itself, man." "Maybe so, but I've known girls before now, not much older than she is, to bring disgrace into a dacent house and lave others to live under it. 'What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh,' they're saying." The woman flinched as if the lash of a whip had fallen on her face, and Dan turned back to the girl. "So you're a fine lady that belaves in the aristocracks, are you? Well, I'm a plain man that doesn't, and nobody living in my house can have any truck with them." "But goodness me, Dan, the boy is not a dale older than herself," said Mrs. Collister. "Nineteen years at the most, and a fine boy at that." "Chut! Nineteen or ninety, it's all as one to me," said Dan, "and this island will be knowing what sort of boy he is before he has done with it." The young cubs of the "big ones" began early. They treated the daughters of decent men as their fathers treated everybody--using them, abusing them, and then treading on them like dirt.