Money in the bank is all the comfort to the material life that a good conscience is to the moral life. Joan was restored to her best self by the confidence her child had given her, and John entering his cottage in the midst of a happy discussion between Denas, Tris, and his wife, felt as if the weight of twenty years suddenly dropped away from him. He thought it was Tris who brought the sunshine, and he rejoiced in it, and induced the young man to tell them about the yacht's trip and the old cities on the Mediterranean which he had visited.
Everyone sees strange places with their own mental and spiritual sight, and Tris had seen Genoa and Venice and Rome and Corinth from the standpoint of a Cornish Methodist fisherman. But apart from this partiality he had made sensible observations of the strange ways of building and living, and had come to the conviction that Cornish people held the great secret of a happy life. As for the Mediterranean itself, Tris considered it "a jade of a sea, nohow worth the praise it got."
"You may read the Cornish seas like a book, John," he said, "but this Mediterranean be this way--you have to watch it every minute. Turn your back on it for a bite or a sup, and it will get the better of you some way, and, most likely of all, with one of its dirty white squalls. Then I tell you, John, it is all hands to reef! Quick! and if a single breadth of canvas be showing, it is a rip and a roar and the death of the yacht and of every man in her."
"And what of the yacht herself, Tris? Be she good-tempered and good-mannered?"
"She do behave herself beautiful. The seas may fly over her cross-trees, but if you make her trig she comes to her bearings like a shot to its mark; shakes herself as if she was ready for a race, and then away she do go--just like a sea-gull for a fish."
So they talked the evening away, and Denas listened and watched the handsome yachtsman, kindling and laughing to the tales he told. And when he went away she felt, as others did, the sudden fall in the mental temperature and the chill and silence that follow any unnatural excitement. But Denas, as well as John and Joan, were too simple for such considerations. They only felt the change, and were sure that it was Tris who brought the sunshine, and so, when he went, took it away with him.