“I am pretty sure you never boarded here?”

“No.” The man again shook his head.

“What did you do here when you were here before?” asked Pleasant. “For I don’t remember you.”

“It’s not at all likely you should. I only stood at the door, one night — on the lower step there — while a shipmate of mine looked in to speak to your father. I remember the place well.” Looking very curiously round it.

“Might that have been long ago?”

“Ay, a goodish bit ago. When I came off my last voyage.”

“Then you have not been to sea lately?”

“No. Been in the sick bay since then, and been employed ashore.”

“Then, to be sure, that accounts for your hands.”

The man with a keen look, a quick smile, and a change of manner, caught her up. “You’re a good observer. Yes. That accounts for my hands.”

Pleasant was somewhat disquieted by his look, and returned it suspiciously. Not only was his change of manner, though very sudden, quite collected, but his former manner, which he resumed, had a certain suppressed confidence and sense of power in it that were half threatening.

“Will your father be long?” he inquired.

“I don’t know. I can’t say.”

“As you supposed he was at home, it would seem that he has just gone out? How’s that?”

“I supposed he had come home,” Pleasant explained.

“Oh! You supposed he had come home? Then he has been some time out? How’s that?”

“I don’t want to deceive you. Father’s on the river in his boat.”

“At the old work?” asked the man.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Pleasant, shrinking a step back. “What on earth d’ye want?”

“I don’t want to hurt your father. I don’t want to say I might, if I chose. I want to speak to him. Not much in that, is there? There shall be no secrets from you; you shall be by. And plainly, Miss Riderhood, there’s nothing to be got out of me, or made of me. I am not good for the Leaving Shop, I am not good for the Boarding-House, I am not good for anything in your way to the extent of sixpenn’orth of halfpence. Put the idea aside, and we shall get on together.”

“But you’re a seafaring man?” argued Pleasant, as if that were a sufficient reason for his being good for something in her way.

“Yes and no. I have been, and I may be again. But I am not for you. Won’t you take my word for it?”

The conversation had arrived at a crisis to justify Miss Pleasant’s hair in tumbling down. It tumbled down accordingly, and she twisted it up, looking from under her bent forehead at the man. In taking stock of his familiarly worn rough-weather nautical clothes, piece by piece, she took stock of a formidable knife in