WHEN the two months had passed we returned to Darrock Hall. Nobody there had received any news in our absence of the whereabouts of my master and his yacht.

Six more weary weeks elapsed, and in that time but one event happened at the Hall to vary the dismal¹ monotony of the lives we now led in the solitary² place. One morning Josephine came down after dressing³ my mistress with her face downright livid to look at, except on one check, where there was a mark as red as burning fire. I was in the kitchen at the time, and I asked what was the matter.

“The matter!” says she, in her shrill⁴ voice and her half-foreign English. “Use your own eyes, if you please, and look at this cheek of mine. What! have you lived so long a time with your mistress, and don’t you know the mark of her hand yet?”

I was at a loss to understand what she meant, but she soon explained herself. My mistress, whose temper had been sadly altered for the worse by the trials and humiliations she had gone through, had got up that morning more out of humor than usual, and, in answer to her maid’s inquiry⁵ as to how she had passed the night, had begun talking about her weary, miserable⁶ life in an unusually fretful and desperate way. Josephine, in trying to cheer her spirits, had ventured, most improperly⁸, on making a light, jesting reference to Mr. Meeke, which had so enraged⁹ my mistress that she turned round sharp on the half-breed and gave her — to use the common phrase — a smart box on the ear. Josephine confessed that, the moment after she had done this, her better sense appeared to tell her that she had taken a most improper⁷ way of resenting

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