“He was Ellen’s build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his age.  He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived.  I knew it wasn’t wise to sail just then.  I said to wait till the New Year....”  Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed by widows.  The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage.  There was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough.  Life had behaved very meanly to this woman.  When she was young and sweet her sweetness had been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances.  Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional people who are old or not perfectly happy.

“You’re not Irish, are you?” she enquired seriously; and immediately he knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naive and touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as he had done, that all other men would have been kind.  Particularly now that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn’t want any Irish coming into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.

“No,” he said reassuringly, “I’m not Irish.  My people have been in Essex for hundreds of years.  I’m afraid,” he added, for so evident was it that most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, “my grandmother was an O’Connor, but she was half French.  Lord, what’s that?”

It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on a sea-wall.  The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed.  Only the continued calm of Mrs. Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial human activity.

“Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger,” said Mrs. Melville.  “We hardly hear it now.  You see, they’ve turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they make with their feet.  It’s not a nice place.  ’Gentlemen a shilling, ladies invited,’ it says outside.  Still, we don’t complain, for the noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent.”