The town was full of country-people who had come in to enjoy themselves, and on this account Barnet strolled through the streets unobserved.

With a certain recklessness he made for the harbour-road, and presently found himself by the shore, where he walked on till he came to the spot near which his friend the kindly Mrs.Downe had lost her life, and his own wife's life had been preserved.

A tremulous pathway of bright moonshine now stretched over the water which had engulfed them, and not a living soul was near.
Here he ruminated on their characters, and next on the young girl in whom he now took a more sensitive interest than at the time when he had been free to marry her.

Nothing, so far as he was aware, had ever appeared in his own conduct to show that such an interest existed.

He had made it a point of the utmost strictness to hinder that feeling from influencing in the faintest degree his attitude towards his wife; and this was made all the more easy for him by the small demand Mrs.Barnet made upon his attentions, for which she ever evinced the greatest contempt; thus unwittingly giving him the satisfaction of knowing that their severance owed nothing to jealousy, or, indeed, to any personal behaviour of his at all.