“Why, sir, as for that,” stammered Nat, “I have had the devil’s own dispute with my father.”

“You treated him with all respect, I hope?”

“With all the respect in the world, sir.  But it scarcely matters, since he has cast me off, and without a penny.”

“Why, then, you can come too!” cried my father, gripping him by the hand.  “Bravo, Prosper! that makes five; and with Billy Priske, when we can find him, six; and that leaves but one to find before dinner-time.”  He pulled out his watch.  “Lord!” he cried, “and ’tis high time to feel hungry, too.  If this lady now will repeat her hospitable offer—­”

I thought at the moment, and I thought once or twice during the meal downstairs, that my father was taxing this poor woman’s hospitality.  I doubted that he, himself so carelessly hospitable, might forget to offer her payment; and lingered after the others had trooped into the passage, with purpose to remind him privately.

“Come,” said he, and made a notion to leave, still without offering to pay.  On the threshold I had almost turned to whisper to him when the woman came after and touched his arm.

“Nay, Sir John,” said she, eagerly, in a low hoarse voice, “let the lad hear me thank you.  He is old enough to understand and clean enough to profit.  Shut the door, child.  You know me, Sir John?”

My father bent his head.  “I never forget a face,” said he, quietly.

“Take notice of that, boy.  Your father remembers me, whom to my knowledge he never saw but once, and then as a magistrate, when he sat to judge me.  Never mind the offence, lad.  I am a sinful woman, and the punishment was—­”

“Nay, nay!” put in my father, gently.

“The punishment was,” she continued, hardening her voice, “to strip me to the waist and whip me in public.  The law allowed this, and this they would have done to me.  But your father, being chairman of the bench—­for the offence lay outside the borough—­would have none of it, and argued and forced three other magistrates to give way.  Little good he did, you may say, seeing that my name is such in Falmouth that, only by entering my door, the Mayor just now did what all his cleverness could never have done—­stopped a riot by a silly brutal laugh—­the chief magistrate taking shelter with Moll Whiteaway!  You can’t get below that for fun, as the folk will take it; and yet I say your father did good, for he saved me from the worst.  And to-day of his goodness he has not remembered my sins, but treated me as though they were not; and today, as only a good man can, he goes from my house, no man thinking to laugh except at his simplicity, even though it were known that I kissed his hand.  God bless you, Sir John, and teach your son to be merciful to women!”

My father was ever so shy of his own kind actions that, when detected by chance or painfully tracked out in one, he kept always a quotation ready to justify what pure impulse had prompted.  So now, as we hurried across the deserted Market Strand to catch up with the other three, he must needs brazen things out with the authority of Bishop Jeremy Taylor.