ing
himself, and worked harder than he had ever worked in his life before.

He was a sturdy, middle-sized man, with a grizzled bullet head and
rounded beard, of a dogged and pertinacious disposition, but capable,
when stirred out of his usual phlegm, of fiery outbursts which overbore
all argument and opposition. His wife died when his boy Tom was three,
and after two years of lonely discomfort he married Nancy Poidestre of
Petit Dixcart, whose people looked upon it as something of a
_mesalliance_ that she should marry out of her own country into Little
Sark.

Nancy was eminently good-looking and a notable housewife, and she went
into Tom Hamon's house of La Closerie with every hope and intention of
making him happy.

But, from the very first, little Tom set his face against her.

It would be hard to say why. Nancy racked her brain for reasons, and
could find none, and was miserable over it.

His father thrashed him for his rudeness and insolence, which only made
matters worse.

His own mother had given way to him in everything, and spoiled him
completely. After her death his father out of pity for his forlorn
estate, had equally given way to him, and only realised, too late, when
he tried to bring him to with a round turn, how thoroughly out of hand
he had got.

When little Tom found, as one consequence of the new mother's arrival,
that his father thrashed instead of humouring him, he put it all down to
the new-comer's account, and set himself to her discomfiture in every
way his barbarous little wits could devise.

He never forgot one awful week he passed in his grandmother's care--a
week that terminated in the arrival of still another new-comer, who, in
course of time, developed into little Nance. It is not impossible that
the remembrance of that black week tended to colour his after-treatment
of his little half-sister. In spite of her winsomeness he hated her
always, and did his very best to make life a burden to her.

When, on that memorable occasion, he was hastily flung by his father
into his grandmother's room, as the result of some wickedness which had
sorely upset his stepmother, and the door was, most unusually, closed
behind him, his first natural impulse was to escape as quickly as
possible.

But he became aware of something unusual and discomforting in the
atmosphere, and when his grandmother said sternly, "Sit down!" and he
turned on her to offer his own opinion on the matter, he found the kee