own along the
old hedges of the garden, or sitting beneath the thatched roof of our
cottage which had stood the wind sweeping off the Channel for more time
than any one at Bolanbywick could remember. She looked like a child
beside him, for his shoulders would measure three of the width of hers.
It was from him I have my frame that once called to the eyes of men to
see the figure that it held, though I say it myself. But from her I got
many a trait that fitted me badly, because craftiness and stubbornness
and a weakness for sentiment and the like of that, had best be in a body
small enough to tame them.

The two of them loved each other completely, each in their way, but it
was well that they had no other children. It was well, perhaps, that
when I was seventeen I had grown strong and quick as a hound. My mother
went with him then for her first voyage since her honeymoon, and it was
the last ever seen of her or him, or the only property we owned, which
was the vessel and a cargo of cotton ducks and sheetings for
speculation, bound to the Gold Coast. Sometimes the sea opens its mouth
like that, and the jaws close again.

There was no more education for me! My father's sister was a
boarding-house keeper in London. I was staying with her then, and when
the lawyer found there was no insurance, life, ship, or cargo, she was
for setting me to work the next morning. Poor woman, she had slaved her
life against dust in halls and cockroaches and couples who wanted rooms
without references and the heart had gone from her, and when she died
she left the best of two thousand pound to a clairvoyant and
card-reader, who had robbed her week after week for ten years and more.

I took a place as companion to an old lady, going to Odymi in Hungary.
It was there one of the doctors, who had seen my two bare forearms,
spoke of my strength and told me that I could make good money as a
rubber in the baths, and I was glad of the change from the old woman. I
was proud and short of tongue and patience with her, and we were always
snarling at each other. But time wears those edges off people, I can
tell you!

It was there, at the baths, I fell in with the woman who called herself
Madame Welstoke. She was an evil woman, and of the worst of such,
because she was one who never seemed bad at first, and then, little by
little, as she showed herself, you could get used to her deviltry and
for each step you could find an apology or excuse, until at la