Sometimes I used to feel as if we hadn’t done such a bad stroke in cutting loose from all this. But then the horrible feeling would come back of never being safe, even for a day, of being dragged oft and put in the dock, and maybe shut up for years and years. Sometimes I used to throw myself down upon the sand and curse the day when I ever did anything that I had any call to be ashamed of and put myself in the power of everything bad and evil in all my life through.

Well, one day I was strolling along, thinking about these things, and wondering whether there was any other country where a man could go and feel himself safe from being hounded down for the rest of his life, when I saw a woman walking on the beach ahead of me. I came up with her before long, and as I passed her she turned her head and I saw she was one of two girls that we had seen in the landlady’s parlour one afternoon. The landlady was a good, decent Scotch woman, and had taken a fancy to both of us (particularly to Jim—as usual). She thought—she was that simple—that we were up country squatters from some far-back place, or overseers. Something in the sheep or cattle line everybody could see that we were. There was no hiding that. But we didn’t talk about ourselves overmuch, for very good reasons. The less people say the more others will wonder and guess about you. So we began to be looked upon as bosses of some sort, and to be treated with a lot of respect that we hadn’t been used to much before. So we began to talk a bit—natural enough—this girl and I. She was a good-looking girl, with a wonderful fresh clear skin, full of life and spirits, and pretty well taught. She and her sister had not been a long time in the country; their father was dead, and they had to live by keeping a very small shop and by dressmaking. They were some kind of cousins of the land lady and the same name, so they used to come and see her of evenings and Sundays. Her name was Kate Morrison and her sister’s was Jeanie. This and a lot more she told me before we got back to the hotel, where she said she was going to stay that night and keep Mrs Morrison company.