"Well, the harder you works, the quicker the time'll pass by. Theer's
nuthin' to grizzle at. Sea-farin' fellers must be away most times. But he'm
a good, straight man, an' you'm tokened to en, an' that's enough. Bide
cheerful an' get the water for washin'. If they things of faither's bant
dry come to-morrer, he'll knaw the reason why."

Joan accepted Mrs. Tregenza's comfort philosophically, though her
sweetheart's departure had not really caused her any emotion. She visited
the larder, drank a cup of milk, and then, fetching an iron hoop and
buckets, went to a sunken barrel outside the cottage door, into which, from
a pipe through the road-bank, tumbled a silver thread of spring water.

Of the Tregenza household a word must needs be spoken. Joan's own mother
had died twelve years ago, and the anxious-natured woman who took her place
proved herself a good step-parent enough. Despite a disposition prone to
worry and to dwell upon the small tribulations of life, Thomasin Tregenza
was not unhappy, for her husband enjoyed prosperity and a reputation for
godliness unequaled in Newlyn. A great, weather-worn, gray, hairy man was
he, with a big head and a furrowed cliff of a forehead that looked as
though it had been carved by its Creator from Cornish granite. Tregenza
indeed might have stood for a typical Cornish fisher--or a Breton. Like
enough, indeed, he had old Armorican blood in his veins, for many hundreds
of Britons betook themselves to ancient Brittany when the Saxon invasion
swept the West, and many afterward returned, with foreign wives, to the
homes of their fathers. Michael Tregenza had found religion, of a sort
fiery and unlovely enough, but his convictions were definite, with
iron-hard limitations, and he looked coldly and without pity on a damned
world, himself saved. Gray Michael had no sympathy with sin and less with
sinners. He found the devil in most unexpected quarters and was always
dragging him out of surprising hiding-places and exhibiting him