on't take warning. How would you like
it, if a policeman came, one of these days, and took you off to that kind
of punishment?"

He looked down on the child, and saw her under-lip working. She held back
her tears bravely, but was shaking from head to foot.

"There now!" said the Elder, in what for him was a soothing voice.
"There's no danger if you behave an' go to school like other children.
You just attend to that, an' we'll say no more about it."

He turned back to his office. On the quay he paused to tell Tom Hancock
that he reckoned the child would be more careful in future: he had given
her something to think over.

II.

A week later, at nine o'clock, Elder Penno was retiring to rest in his
bedroom, which overlooked his boat-building yard, when a clattering noise
broke on the night without, and so startled him that he all but dropped
his watch in the act of winding it.

The noise suggested an avalanche of falling boxes. The Elder blew out his
candle, lit a bull's-eye lantern which he kept handy by his bed, and,
throwing up the window, challenged loudly--"Who's there?"

For the moment the ray of the bull's-eye revealed no one. He turned it
upon the corner of the yard where, as a rule, stood a pile of empty
packing-cases from the shop, 'empties' waiting to be sorted out and
returned, old butter-barrels condemned to be knocked to pieces for
kindling-wood. Yes: the sound had come from there, for the pile had
toppled over and lay in a long moraine across the entrance gate.
"Must ha' been built up top-heavy," said the Elder to himself: and with
that, running his lantern-ray along the yard wall, he caught sight of a
small bare leg and a few inches of striped skirt for an instant before
they slid into darkness across the coping. He recognised them.

"This beats Old Harry!" muttered the Elder. "Bringin' up the child to be
a gaol-bird now--and on my premises! As if Sam Tregenza hadn' done me
injury enough without that!"

For two years the Elder had been unable to think of Sam Tregenza or to
hear his name mentioned, but a mixture of rage and indignation boiled up
within him. To be sure, the old man was ruined, had fallen on evil days,
subsisted now with the help of half a crown a week parish relief.
But he had behaved disgracefully, and his fall was a signal vindication of
God's justice. How else could one account for it? The man had been a
wise fisherman, as knowledgable as any in Ardevora. He had b