to provide for a stranger has passed off with no worse mishap than
disappointing him.

A cottage which stood on a high slope above this townlet and its bay
resounded one morning with the notes of a merry company. Ethelberta had
managed to find room for herself and her young relations in the house of
one of the boatmen, whose wife attended upon them all. Captain Flower,
the husband, assisted her in the dinner preparations, when he slipped
about the house as lightly as a girl and spoke of himself as cook's mate.
The house was so small that the sailor's rich voice, developed by
shouting in high winds during a twenty years' experience in the coasting
trade, could be heard coming from the kitchen between the chirpings of
the children in the parlour. The furniture of this apartment consisted
mostly of the painting of a full-rigged ship, done by a man whom the
captain had specially selected for the purpose because he had been seven-
and-twenty years at sea before touching a brush, and thereby offered a
sufficient guarantee that he understood how to paint a vessel properly.

Before this picture sat Ethelberta in a light linen dress, and with
tightly-knotted hair--now again Berta Chickerel as of old--serving out
breakfast to the rest of the party, and sometimes lifting her eyes to the
outlook from the window, which presented a happy combination of grange
scenery with marine. Upon the irregular slope between the house and the
quay was an orchard of aged trees wherein every apple ripening on the
boughs presented its rubicund side towards the cottage, because that
building chanced to lie upwards in the same direction as the sun. Under
the trees were a few Cape sheep, and over them the stone chimneys of the
village below: outside these lay the tanned sails of a ketch or smack,
and the violet waters of the bay, seamed and creased by breezes
insufficient to raise waves; beyond all a curved wall of cliff,