st keep his feet on the
floor, good God--keep them very squarely on the floor--for otherwise,
wasn't it possible to conceive of their skirting the edge of unnamable
abysses? In furtherance of that so necessary soberness of outlook he now
went on speaking.

"But before I go, I want to hark back to a matter of quite ancient
history--your lost shoes and stockings--for thereby hangs a tale."

And he proceeded to tell her how, about a week ago, being caught by a
wild flurry of rain in an outlying part of the island, behind the black
cottages and Inn, he took shelter in a disused ruinous boat-house opening
on the great reed-beds which here rim the shore. A melancholy, forsaken
place, from which, at low tide, you can walk across the mud-flats to
Lampit, with a pleasing chance of being sucked under by quicksands. Abram
Sclanders' unhappy half-witted son haunted this boat-house, it seemed,
storing his shrimping nets there, any other things as well, a venerable
magpie's hoard of scraps and lumber; using it as a run-hole, too, when
the other lads hunted and tormented him according to their healthy,
brutal youthful way.

--A regular joss-house, he'd made of it. And set up in one corner, white
and ghostly--making you stare a minute when you first came inside--a
ship's figure-head, a three-foot odd Britannia, pudding-basin bosomed and
eagle-featured, with castellated headgear, clasping a trident in her
hand. She, as presiding deity and--

"In front of her," Faircloth said, his chin still in his hands and eyes
gazing away to the Bar--"earth and pebbles banked up into a flat-topped
mound, upon which stood your shoes filled with sprays of hedge fruit and
yellow button-chrysanthemums--stolen too, I suppose, from one of the
gardens at Lampit. They grow freely there. Your silk stockings hung round
her neck, a posy of flowers twisted into them.--When I came on this
exhibition, I can't quite tell you how I felt. It raised Cain in me to
think of that degraded, misbegotten creature pawing over and playing
about with anything which had belonged to you. I was for making
Sclanders, his father, bring him over and give him the thrashing of his
life, right there before the proofs of his sins."

"But you didn't," Damaris cried. "You didn't. What do my shoes and
stockings matter? I oughtn't to have left them on the shore. It was
putting temptation in his way."

Faircloth looked at her smiling.

"No I didn't, and for two reasons. One that I kne