r. This man was a
native of the port, and it was understood that he and Naomi had been
well acquainted, years ago, before he started on his first voyage and
some time before Naomi married. Tiring of the sea in time, he had
found work on the jetties and rented this room for sixpence a week. In
these days he and Naomi rarely spoke to each other beyond exchanging
a "Good-morning" when they met on the stairway, nor did he show any
friendliness beyond tapping at her mother's door and inquiring about
her once a day whenever she happened to be down with the fever. I have
made researches and find that the rest of the house was tenanted at
that time by a working block-maker, with his wife and four children;
a widow and her son just returned from sea with an injured spine; a
young couple without children. But these do not come into the tale.

Now the history of Naomi was this. She was married at three-and-twenty
to Abe Bricknell, a young sailor of the port, and as steady as a woman
could wish. In the third year of their married life, and a week
after obtaining his certificate, he sailed out of Troy as mate of a
fruit-ship, a barque, that never came back, nor was sighted again
after passing the Lizard lights.

Naomi--a tall up-standing woman with deep, gentle eyes, like a cow's,
and a firm mouth that seldom spoke--took her affliction oddly. She
neither wailed nor put on mourning. She looked upon it as a matter
between herself and her Maker, and said:

"God has done this thing to me; therefore I have finished with Him. I
am no man to go and revenge myself by breaking all the Commandments.
But I am a woman and can suffer. Let Him do His worst: I defy Him."

So she never set foot inside church again, nor offered any worship.
The week long she worked as a laundress, and sat through the Sundays
with her arms folded, gloomily fighting her duel. When the fever
wrenched her arms and lips as she stood by the wash-tub, she set her
teeth and said, "I can stand it. I can match all this with contempt.
He can kill, but that's not beating me."

Her mother, a large and pale-faced woman of sixty, with an apparently
thoughtful contraction of the lips, in reality due to a habit of
carrying pins in her mouth, watched Naomi anxiously during this period
of her life. And Long Oliver watched her too, though secretly, with
eyes screwed up after the fashion of men who have followed the sea.

One day he stopped her on the stairs and asked, abruptly: