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‘Why, you’re a liar, saying you never set eyes on me before,’ barked the man near the hearth. ‘You’re married to me, and that girl Maryann you had by me–well enough you know it.’

The young soldiers looked on in delight, the sergeant smoked imperturbed.

‘Yes,’ sang the landlady, slowly shaking her head in supreme sarcasm, ‘it sounds very pretty, doesn’t it? But you see we don’t believe a word of it, and how are you going to prove it?’ She smiled nastily.

The man watched in silence for a moment, then he said:

‘It wants no proof.’

‘Oh, yes, but it does! Oh, yes, but it does, sir, it wants a lot of proving!’ sang the lady’s sarcasm. ‘We’re not such gulls as all that, to swallow your words whole.’

But he stood unmoved near the fire. She stood with one hand resting on the zinc-covered bar, the sergeant sat with legs crossed, smoking, on the seat halfway between them, the three young soldiers in their shirts and braces stood wavering in the gloom behind the bar. There was silence.

‘Do you know anything of the whereabouts of your husband, Mrs. Nankervis? Is he still living?’ asked the sergeant, in his judicious fashion.

Suddenly the landlady began to cry, great scalding tears, that left the young men aghast.

‘I know nothing of him,’ she sobbed, feeling for her pocket handkerchief. ‘He left me when Maryann was a baby, went mining to America, and after about six months never wrote a line nor sent me a penny bit. I can’t say whether he’s alive or dead, the villain. All I’ve heard of him’s to the bad–and I’ve heard nothing for years an’ all, now.’ She sobbed violently.

The golden-skinned, handsome man near the fire watched her as she wept. He was frightened, he was troubled, he was bewildered, but none of his emotions altered him underneath.

There was no sound in the room but the violent sobbing of the landlady. The men, one and all, were overcome.

‘Don’t you think as you’d better go, for tonight?’ said the sergeant to the man, with sweet reasonableness. ‘You’d better leave it a bit, and arrange something between you. You can’t have much claim on a woman, I should imagine, if it’s how she says. And you’ve come down on her a bit too sudden-like.’

The landlady sobbed heart-brokenly. The man watched her large breasts shaken. They seemed to cast a spell over his mind.

‘How I’ve treated her, that’s no matter,’ he replied. ‘I’ve come back, and I’m going to stop in my own home–for a bit, anyhow. There you’ve got it.’

‘A dirty action,’ said the sergeant, his face flushing dark. ‘A dirty action, to come, after deserting a woman for that number of years, and want to force yourself on her! A dirty action–as isn’t allowed by the law.’

The landlady wiped her eyes.

‘Never you mind about law nor nothing,’ cried the man, in a strange, strong voice. ‘I’m not moving out of this public tonight.’

The woman turned to the soldiers behind her, and said in a wheedling, sarcastic tone:

‘Are we going to stand it, boys?–Are we going to be done like this, Sergeant Thomas, by a scoundrel and a bully as has led a life beyond mention, in those American mining-camps, and then wants to come back and make havoc of a poor woman’s life and savings, after having left her with a baby in arms to struggle as best she might? It’s a crying shame if nobody will stand up for me–a crying shame–!’

The soldiers and the little sergeant were bristling. The woman stooped and rummaged under the counter for a minute. Then, unseen to the man away near the fire, she threw out a plaited grass rope, such as is used for binding bales, and left it lying near the feet of the young soldiers, in the gloom at the back of the bar.

Then she rose and fronted the situation.

‘Come now,’ she said to the man, in a reasonable, coldly-coaxing tone, ‘put your coat on and leave us alone. Be a man, and not worse than a brute of a German. You can get a bed easy enough in St Just, and if you’ve nothing to pay for it sergeant would lend you a couple of shillings, I’m sure he would.’