Next morning Marchmill was called at six o’clock; and in waking and yawning she heard him muttering to himself: ‘What the deuce is this that’s been crackling under me so?’ Imagining her asleep he searched round him and withdrew something. Through her half-opened eyes she perceived it to be Mr. Trewe. ‘Well, I’m damned!’ her husband exclaimed. ‘What, dear?’ said she. ‘O, you are awake? Ha! ha!’ ‘What _do_ you mean?’ ‘Some bloke’s photograph—a friend of our landlady’s, I suppose. I wonder how it came here; whisked off the table by accident perhaps when they were making the bed.’ ‘I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped in then.’ ‘O, he’s a friend of yours? Bless his picturesque heart!’ Ella’s loyalty to the object of her admiration could not endure to hear him ridiculed. ‘He’s a clever man!’ she said, with a tremor in her gentle voice which she herself felt to be absurdly uncalled for. ‘He is a rising poet—the gentleman who occupied two of these rooms before we came, though I’ve never seen him.’ ‘How do you know, if you’ve never seen him?’ ‘Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.’ ‘O; well, I must up and be off. I shall be home rather early. Sorry I can’t take you to-day, dear. Mind the children don’t go getting drowned.’ That day Mrs. Marchmill inquired if Mr. Trewe were likely to call at any other time. ‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Hooper. ‘He’s coming this day week to stay with a friend near here till you leave. He’ll be sure to call.’ Marchmill did return quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he and his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had expected to do—in short, in three days. ‘Surely we can stay a week longer?’ she pleaded. ‘I like it here.’ ‘I don’t. It is getting rather slow.’ ‘Then you might leave me and the children!’ ‘How perverse you are, Ell! What’s the use? And have to come to fetch you! No: we’ll all return together; and we’ll make out our time in North Wales or Brighton a little later on. Besides, you’ve three days longer yet.’ It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose rival talent she had a despairing admiration, and to whose person she was now absolutely attached. Yet she determined to make a last effort; and having gathered from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely spot not far from the fashionable town on the Island opposite, she crossed over in the packet from the neighbouring pier the following afternoon.