She
was too full of the milk of human kindness, too prone to forgive and
forget, too tolerant and ready to see good in all men. The fiery sustenance
of the new tenets withered her away like a scorched flower, and she died
five years after her child was born. For a space of two years the widower
remained one; then he married again, being at that time a hale man of
forty, the owner of his own fishing-boat, and at once the strongest
personality and handsomest person in Newlyn. Thomasin Strick, his second
wife, was already a Luke Gospeler and needed no conversion. People laughed
in secret at their wooing, and likened it to the rubbing of granite rocks
or a miner's pick striking fire from tin ore. A boy presently came to them;
and now he was ten and his mother forty. She passed rightly for a careful,
money-loving soul, and a good wife, with the wit to be also a good Luke
Gospeler. But her tongue was harder than her heart. Father and mother alike
thought the wide world of their boy, though the child was brought up under
an iron rod. Joan, too, loved her half-brother, Tom, very dearly, and took
a pride only second to her stepmother's in the lad's progress and
achievements. More than once, though only Joan and he knew it, she had
saved his skin from punishment, and she worshiped him with a frank
admiration which was bound to win Mrs. Tregenza's regard. Joan quite
understood the careful and troubled matron, never attached undue importance
to her sharp words, and was usually at her elbow with an ear for all
grievances and even a sympathetic word if the same seemed called for.
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