Sometimes, indeed, he would go down to The Ship in the evening and lounge in the bar with the rest, but even there his solitude still wrapped him round.  He never expanded, however genial the atmosphere.

The other men treated him with instinctive respect.  He was powerful enough to thrash any two of them, and no one cared to provoke him to wrath.  For Rufus in anger was a veritable mad bull.

“Leave him alone!  He’s not safe!” was the general advice and warning of his fellows, and none but Adam ever interfered with him.

Just recently, however, Adam had begun to take a somewhat quizzical interest in the welfare of his son.  It had been an established custom ever since his second marriage that Rufus should eat his Sunday dinner at the family table down at The Ship.  Mrs. Peck—­Adam’s wife was never known by any other title, just as the man’s own surname had dropped into such disuse that few so much as knew what it was—­had made an especial point of this, and Rufus had never managed to invent any suitable excuse for refusing.  He never remained long after the meal was eaten.  When all the other fisher-lads were walking the cliffs with their own particular lasses, Rufus was wont to trudge back to his hermitage and draw his mantle of solitude about him once more.  He had never walked with any lass.  Whether from shyness or surliness, he had held consistently aloof from such frivolous pastimes.  If a girl ever cast a saucy look his way the brooding blue eyes never seemed aware of it.  In speech with womenkind he was always slow and half-reluctant.  That his great bull-like physique could by any means be an object of admiration was a possibility that he never seemed to contemplate.  In fact, he seemed expectant of ridicule rather than appreciation.

In his boyhood he had fought several tough fights with certain lads who had dared to scoff at his red hair.  Sam Jefferson, who lived down on the quay, still bore the marks of one such battle in the absence of two front teeth.  But he did not take affront from womenkind.  He looked over their heads, and went his way in massive unconcern.

But lately a change had come into his life—­such a change as made Adam’s shrewd dark eyes twinkle whenever they glanced in his son’s direction, comprehending that the days of Rufus’s tranquillity were ended.

A witch had come to live at The Ship, such a witch as had never before danced along the Spear Point sands.  Her name was Maria Peck, and she was the daughter of Mrs. Peck’s late lamented husband’s vagabond brother—­“a seafaring man and a wastrel if ever there was one,” as Mrs. Peck was often heard to declare.  He had picked up with and eventually married a Spanish pantomime girl up London way, so Mrs. Peck’s information went, and Maria had been the child of their union.