t to spoil my legs,
but I feel like trying."

IV.

Up at Steens the young widow spent the three days before the funeral in a
flutter of the nerves. For reasons of her own she stood in fear of her
stepson, and felt herself in hourly desperate need of a male champion.
Yet she had pluck as well as a head on her shoulders. She might have
summoned--what more natural at such a time?--her old father, the
fisherman, over from Porthleven; but she argued it out with herself,
and decided that his presence would be a protection rather apparent than
real, and might easily set Roger suspecting. Even less politic would be
the presence of her Penzance lawyer, Mr. Alfonso Trudgian. In the early
morning hours after her husband's death she sat a long while with her
hands in her lap, thinking. She was a young and pretty woman, and by no
means a bad one. But she had not married old Humphrey for love, and she
meant to have her rights now. Also her having married Humphrey was proof
of that courage which she now distrusted. While her heart sank at the
prospect, she resolved to meet and face Roger alone.

He came on horseback that same evening, with Malachi on horseback behind
him--both in their best black clothes with hideous black streamers pinned
to their hats and dangling. Mrs. Stephen, having made enquiries among the
servants--it added to her helplessness that she had never prevailed on
Humphrey to dismiss his old servants, though she had made more than one
attempt, and they knew it and hated her for it--had Roger's old room
prepared for him, and met him at the door with decorous politeness.

Roger had never set eyes on her before. But she had long ago made it her
business to see him; had, in fact, put on bonnet and shawl one day and
visited Helleston on pretence of shopping, and had, across the width of
Coinagehall Street, been struck with terrified admiration of his stern
face and great stature, recognising at a glance that here was a stronger
man and better worth respecting than old Humphrey--a very dangerous man
indeed for an enemy.

Roger in return considered her merely as a hussy--a designing baggage who
had sold herself to an old fool. He came with a mind quite clear about
this, and was not the sort of man to dismiss a prejudice easily.
But her greeting, though it did not disarm him, forced him to defer
hostilities for the moment, and in his room he allowed to himself that the
woman had shown sense. He could n