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the sign above the yard entrance - ‘Thomas Coombe, Boat Builder’. He had already made more of a name for himself in Plyn than ever his uncle had.
    Janet had done well for herself when she married him, thought Thomas, and what more could any woman want than the home he had given her, and his care for her, and the boy in the bargain, with more to follow if it pleased God.
    So much for Thomas, as he stood in his yard with his tall, upright figure, calling out sharp orders in a lofty tone to the men who worked for him.
    Janet had seen the change in Thomas, but she did not blame him for it. To her the ways of a man were no mystery, she accepted them as natural. That his work should now hold a prior claim was just; she would have despised him if he had been content to let the business care for itself in the old slip-shod manner of Uncle Coombe’s day, and he himself had mooned around the house because of her.
    In the realities of life she saw straight before her, knowing truth from falsehood and that changes in people could be accounted for and observed, without bemoaning the fact and shutting her eyes to it. She knew that Thomas’s love for her was solid and true, and that he would never look elsewhere than to her face for comfort; but she knew also that the strange exquisite worship - the sweet bewildered passion that sweeps a boy who possesses a woman for the first time had gone - never to return.
    Samuel had strengthened the blood-tie between them, but no more than this. They would cherish each other in sickness and in health, walk through life sharing its pleasures and its sorrows, sleep side by side at night in the little room above the porch, grow old and frail, resting at last, not parted, in Lanoc Churchyard - but from the beginning to the end they would have no knowledge of one another.
    Janet’s feeling for Samuel ran parallel to her feeling for Thomas. The one was her husband, the other was her child. Samuel depended on her for care and for comfort until he should grow old enough to look after himself. She washed him and dressed him, seated him beside her in his high chair at table and fed him, helped him with his first steps and his first words, gave him all the tenderness and the affection he demanded from her. She gave to both Thomas and Samuel her natural spontaneity of feeling and a great simplicity of heart; but the spirit of Janet was free and unfettered, waiting to rise from its self-enforced seclusion to mingle with intangible things, like the wind, the sea, and the skies, hand in hand with the one for whom she waited. Then she, too, would become part of these things forever, abstract and immortal.
    Because of her knowledge that this would come to pass, Janet strove to banish despondency. She hid her loneliness, and always appeared willing and cheerful in the face of others.
    It was as if she had two selves; the one of a contented wife and mother, who listened to her husband’s plans and ceaseless talk of his great business, and laughed at her baby’s prattle, and visited her own folk and the neighbours of Plyn, with a real pleasure and enjoyment of the happenings of her daily life; and another self, remote, untrammelled, triumphant, who stood tiptoe on the hills, mist-hidden from the world, and where the light of the sun shone upon her face, splendid and true.
    These things were not conscious definitions in Janet’s mind; introspection belonged not to the inhabitants of Plyn in the early days of the nineteenth century and to the twenty-one-year-old wife of a Cornish boat-builder. All she understood was that the peace of God was unknown to her, and that she came nearer to it amongst the wild things in the woods and fields, or on the rocks by the water’s edge, than she did with her own folk in Plyn.
    Only glimpses of peace came her way, streaks of clarity at unwakened moments that assured her of its existence and of the certainty that one day she would hold the secret for her own.
    So Janet bided her