And just after Elizabeth's marriage came on the hardest and most distinctive part of the fisher's year. All along the rocky coast the "huers" were standing watching for the shoals of pilchard, and the men were in the boats beneath, waiting for their signal to shoot the seines. Every fisher had now, in an intense degree, the look which always distinguishes him--the look of a man accustomed to reflect and to be ready for emergencies. This year the shoals were so large that boat-loads were caught easily in fifty feet of water.
Then every wife in the hamlet had her hands full and busy from dawn till dark; and Joan went to the work with an exuberant alacrity and good nature. In former years Denas had felt all the enthusiasm of the great sea harvest. This year she could not endure its clamour and its labour. What had happened to her that the sight of the beautiful fish was offensive and the smell of its curing intolerable? She shut her eyes from the silvery heaps and would gladly have closed her ears against the jubilant mirth, the shouting and laughing and singing around her.
Her intense repugnance did really at last breed in her a low fever, which she almost gladly succumbed to. She thought it easier to lie in bed and suffer in solitude than to put her arms to her white elbows in fresh fish and bear the familiar jokes of the busy, merry workers in the curing-sheds. Denas was not really responsible for this change. It had grown into her nature, day by day and week by week, while she was unconscious of any transforming power. The little reluctances which had marked its first appearance had been of small note; her father and mother had only laughingly reproved them, telling her "not to nourish prideful notions." She had not even been aware of nourishing anything wrong. Was it wrong? She lay tossing on her bed in the small warm room, and argued the question out while fever burned in her veins and gave to all things abnormal and extravagant aspects.
She was really ill, and she almost wished she could be more ill. No one quite believed she was suffering much. The headache and languor incident to her condition did not win much sympathy until their ravages became apparent. Then Joan honestly believed that a little exercise in the fresh salt air would have cured, perhaps even prevented, the illness. So that at this time Denas thought herself very unkindly used.