We're a people of presentiments down here on the Flats, and well we
may be. You'd own up yourself, maybe, if in the dark of the night, you
locked in sleep, there's a knock on the door enough to wake the dead,
and you start up and listen and nothing follows; and falling back,
you're just dozing off, and there it is once more, so that the lad in
the next room cries out, "Who's that, mother?" No one answering, you're
half lost again, when _rap_ comes the hand again, the loudest of the
three, and you spring to the door and open it, and there's nought there
but a wind from the graves blowing in your face; and after a while you
learn that in that hour of that same night your husband was lost at sea.
Well, that happened to Mrs. Devereux. And I haven't time to tell you the
warnings I've known of. As for Faith, I mind that she said herself, as
we were in the boat for that clear midnight sail, that the sea had a
spite against her, but third time was trying time.

So Faith grew up, and Dan sent her to school what he could, for he set
store by her. She was always ailing,--a little, wilful, pettish thing,
but pretty as a flower; and folks put things into her head, and she
began to think she was some great shakes; and she may have been a matter
of seventeen years old when Mrs. Devereux died. Dan, as simple at
twenty-six as he had been ten years before, thought to go on just in
the old way, but the neighbors were one too many for him; and they all
represented that it would never do, and so on, till the poor fellow got
perplexed and vexed and half beside himself. There wasn't the first
thing she could do for herself, and he couldn't afford to board her out,
for Dan was only a laboring-man, mackerelling all summer and shoemaking
all winter, less the dreadful times when he stayed out on the Georges;
and then he couldn't afford, either, to keep her there and ruin the poor
girl's reputation;--and what did Dan do but come to me with it all?