Her eyes were betwixt blue and grey and sometimes favoured one colour and
sometimes t'other, and her hair was a light brown and her figure inclined
to the slim. But she was very near about five foot eight--two inches
shorter than me--and of an amazing activity and enjoying most perfect
health. Her home was in Little Silver, which is our village; and only
poverty and the need for work had took her out of it. There she tended her
widowed father, and he had such a passion for the girl, her being his only
one, that 'twas only the shadow of the Union Workhouse ever steeled him to
part from her. But she saw him oftener than her day out and would many a
time run like a lapwing the mile to his cottage, so as he should have a
glimpse of her. And it was her wages that helped the man to carry on. He
hated her working at Oakshotts and prayed ceaselessly to her to come back
and starve along with him, for he was a very unreasonable fashion of
man--a dog-like man with one idea and one worship and one religion, you
may say. In fact he lived for Jenny alone, and when I came to be acquaint
with him, I feared it was to be war to the knife between us. He always
proved queer and difficult, and nought but my great love for Jenny would
have made me tolerate a man like Joshua Owlet for a moment.
You couldn't absolutely say there was a screw loose in him, because to
love your only child with all right and proper devotion is in the order of
nature; but to come between a daughter and her future mate, when the mate
was a man like me, seemed weak-minded, to say no more.
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