He asked her
permission to accompany her on her walk, but she said she was not going
much further in that direction; she was going to turn round. He turned
round with her, and they went back together to the village, in which he
at last began to discover a certain consistency, signs of habitation,
houses disposed with a rough resemblance to a plan. The road wandered
among them with a kind of accommodating sinuosity, and there were even
cross-streets, and an oil-lamp on a corner, and here and there the small
sign of a closed shop, with an indistinctly countrified lettering. There
were lights now in the windows of some of the houses, and Doctor Prance
mentioned to her companion several of the inhabitants of the little
town, who appeared all to rejoice in the prefix of captain. They were
retired shipmasters; there was quite a little nest of these worthies,
two or three of whom might be seen lingering in their dim doorways, as
if they were conscious of a want of encouragement to sit up, and yet
remembered the nights in far-away waters when they would not have
thought of turning in at all. Marmion called itself a town, but it was a
good deal shrunken since the decline in the shipbuilding interest; it
turned out a good many vessels every year, in the palmy days, before the
war. There were shipyards still, where you could almost pick up the old
shavings, the old nails and rivets, but they were grass-grown now, and
the water lapped them without anything to interfere.
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