‘His young lady?’ she asked.

Mr Caunter looked at her as one old crony might look at another, and smiled.

‘Well—as to whether they were married or no, that I won’t say. These artists don’t think so much of matrimony as other folk do, seemingly.’

‘No. Sometimes they don’t think of it at all.’20

‘But, married or t’other thing,’ said Mr Caunter, his shiplike bulk putting on a sudden majesty of full sail, ‘I can say this. They were happy. Happy as the day is long. And loving each other. Head over ears in love. Fit to tear each other. Ah! One doesn’t see the like of that more than once in a lifetime—and maybe not then. But there they were. I saw them. And I shan’t forget it.’

He drank solemnly, and was silent, looking at her as though she were the same woman at whose table he had sat down five minutes before, as though, out of the neatly raked ashes, jealousy had not exploded and hurled her back from the security of being married to Charles Vincent to the agony of being married to Ludovick Dodge. It must have begun the moment her back was turned. Who was she? Where had he got her—this bitch with whom he had been so happy and glorious?

‘What was she like, this young lady?’ she asked conversationally, and, noticing the fires shaken from the diamonds on her fingers, she hid her twitching hands under the table.

‘Well, now, that’s a question I can’t rightly answer. You know a lark by the song, and not by the feathers. And when you see a young lady so blazingly in love, you don’t stop to notice what colour her eyes are. She was young, you know. Dressed herself in nice bright colours; never wore a hat. And nimble. Wonderfully light on her feet, she was. Many’s the time I’ve seen her run up the steps from the harbour to Prospect Terrace, as though it were no more to her than the bedchamber stairs. Carrying a great parcel of fish, and the Lord knows what else.’21

So you had to do that too, she thought. Hope you liked it.

‘I never saw her sick or sorrowful but once,’ said Mr Caunter. ‘And that was when he was ill. He’d set his heart on a red mullet, and she came after it. I’d have dived into the sea and brought one out in my mouth for that young man. But there wasn’t a red mullet in the catch that day. When I told her so, she stood there and cursed and damned me, with the tears raining down over her cheeks. But he soon picked up, and they were ramping and tearing over the moor, happy as ever.’

Different woman, but the same Ludovick, she thought.

‘Not that they didn’t have their little differences. Wouldn’t have been like lovers not to.’ A slow grin rocked his whiskers. ‘One day, I happened to be going past their gate and I heard them disputing withindoors. He gave a yell and came running down the path, and she raced after him and clapped a pot of blue paint over his head. And what did he do? Knocked her clean into the hedge, and came walking on with his easel and all the rest of his gear. And the blue paint streaming down all over him.’