Jack went his way, dissatisfied with himself, with Winefred, with the whole world. Why had the girl spoken to him, looked at him, defied him as she had done? It was perhaps natural, reasonable, excusable, that she should regard him with an unfriendly eye, in consequence of what was rumoured relative to her mother and his father. If this story were baseless, as possibly it was, then both women must feel acutely having so gross an act of dishonesty laid to their charge, and be predisposed to look upon him as an instigator of the calumnies that had caused them intolerable annoyance. That Winefred was wretched Jack had read in her face. He pitied her, and yet he was angry with her for the manner in which she treated him. If the women were innocent, he said to himself, they did not act in such a manner as to disarm suspicion. And whether guilty or not they were not a pleasing couple, Jane Marley with her furious temper, Winefred with her pride. The world is a looking-glass. As is the face that you present to it, such is the face that looks back at you. Assuredly Winefred made no attempt by gentleness to win back for herself those who were alienated, not through any fault of her own doubtless, but because of the suspicion that dogged her mother. Had the girl possessed a good heart, would she have spoken to Jack as she had done? 'Bah!' said he aloud, as he kicked before him the flints that strewed the down and glistened in the moonlight, 'bah! What is she to me? I will cast her out of my thoughts.' But it is sometimes easier to form a resolution than to adhere to it. He found himself reverting incessantly to the picture of the frowning girl with clenched hands on her lap, seated in the barn, alone amidst many, or to her in the moonlight menacing him with the thorn branch. So he walked back to the ferryman's cottage, and, avoiding conversation with Olver, threw himself on his bed. Dench had, indeed, sought to detain him by asking questions as to where he had been, whether he had obtained employment, and what he proposed for the morrow, but the boy answered that he was wearied and indisposed to talk. 'He will be brought to it yet,' said the ferryman to himself. 'Those Beer fellows, and, above all, David Nutall, are a bit shy of me and suspect something. But if I have this greenhorn here, and can thrust him in among them, I shall know all their movements, and can sell them in a lump when I have a mind to.' Since the disposal of the house that had belonged to his father, Jack had not been up to it; he had avoided it. But on the morrow, after another day of ineffectual search after employment, towards evening he walked over the down at the head of the cliffs and descended to the undercliff where the cottage stood.