His brown face and frank sailor bearing and good looks would have been sufficient in themselves to make him a favourite with the ladies.

But, in addition to these claims upon their interest, he had been known to most of the younger ones among them from his schoolboy days, when he used to come home on leave as a cadet, and he seemed to enjoy particular confidential relations with nearly every one of them, or, at all events, to be in possession of some secret or other which only they two knew.

They had all kinds of jokes and expressions from their younger days which were unintelligible to the rest; and what is vulgarly called "chaff" formed, perhaps, the staple of his conversation with them, varied now and then by a touch of sentiment, which was intended, by chance as it were, to open up to them for a moment the real deeper nature which they might not have suspected him of possessing.

They used to twit him about his inclination to stoutness, and he used to joke about it too, and say he had too good a time of it.
Among the Becks' most frequent visitors out there was postmaster Forstberg's family, which included, besides the parents, a hobbledehoy son and their daughter Marie, a fair-haired girl some eighteen years of age, of quiet manners, and with an uncommonly clever face.

Nobody said that she was pretty, but nearly every one who knew her had the impression that she was; and there was a certain indefinable harmony and grace, not only about her perhaps rather small figure, but about everything she did.