It took him some time to arrive at the correct relationship between young Tom and Nance and Bernel, for it seemed quite incredible that fruit so diverse should spring from one parent stem.

For Tom was all that was rough and boorish—­rude to Mrs. Hamon, coarse, and at times overbearing to Nance and Bernel, to such an extent, indeed, that more than once Gard had difficulty in remembering that he himself was only a visitor on sufferance and not entitled to interfere in such intimate family matters.

Tom was not slow to perceive this, and in consequence set himself deliberately to provoke it by behaviour even more outrageous than usual.  Time and again Gard would have rejoiced to take him outside and express his feelings to their fullest satisfaction.

With Mrs. Hamon and Bernel he was on the most friendly footing, his undisguised sentiments in the matter of Tom commending him to them decisively.

But with Nance he made no headway whatever.

It was an absolutely new sensation to him, and a satisfaction the meaning of which he had not yet fully gauged, to be living under the same roof with a girl such as this.  He found himself listening for her voice outside and the sound of her feet, and learned almost at once to distinguish between the clatter of her wooden pattens and any one else’s when she was busy in the yard or barns.

Even though she held him at coolest arm’s length, and repelled any slightest attempt at abridgment of the distance, he still rejoiced in the sight of her and found the world good because of her presence in it.

He did not understand her feeling about him in the least.  He did not know that she had had to give up her room for him—­that she detested the mines and everything tainted by them, and himself as head and forefront of the offence—­that she regarded him as an outsider and a foreigner and therefore quite out of place in Sark.  He only knew that he saw very little of her and would have liked to see a great deal more.

The very reserve of her treatment of himself—­one might even say her passive endurance of him—­served but to stimulate within him the wish to overcome it.  The attraction of indifference is a distinct force in life.

There was something so trim and neat and altogether captivating to him in the slim energetic figure, in its short blue skirts and print jacket, as it whisked to and fro, inside and out, on its multifarious duties, and still more in the sweet, serious face, glimmering coyly in the shadow of the great sun-bonnet and always moulded to a fine, but, as it seemed to him, a somewhat unnatural gravity in his company.

And yet he was quite sure she could be very much otherwise when she would.  For he had heard her singing over her work, and laughing merrily with Bernel; and her face, sweet as it was in its repression, seemed to him more fitted for smiles and laughter and joyousness.

He saw, of course, that brother Tom was a constant source of annoyance to them all, but especially to her, and his blood boiled impotently on her account.