A Sea Upcast by Thomas A. Janvier

When Tess came to breakfast the next morning it gave me a real turn to look at her. Somehow, at a single jump, she seemed to have changed from a girl to a woman -- and to an old woman at that. Suddenly she had got to be all withered like, and the airs that she used to give herself and all the pretty ways of her were gone. She just moped in a chair in a corner -- she who'd never been quiet for five minutes together, any more than a bird -- with a far-away look in her beautiful eyes, and the glint of tears in them. Sorrow had got into the very bones of her. "Dost think I really am come of such foul folk that I'm not fit for honest company? " she asked my mother -- and if she asked that question once that morning she asked it a dozen times.

In a way, of course, she had known what she was all her life long. "My sea-baby" was my mother's pet name for her at the first; and by that pet-name, when most tender with her, my mother called her till the last. How she had come to us, how I had found her where the waves had left her and had carried her home in my little tired arms, she had been told over and over again. Sometimes she used to make up stories about herself in her light-fancied way: telling us that she was a great lady of Spain, and that some fine morning the great Spanish lord her father would come to Southwold by some chance or other, and would know her by the chain and the locket, and would take her home with him and marry her to a duke -- or to a prince, even -- in her own land. We'd see that she'd be pretending to herself while she told them to us that these stories were true, and I think that she did half believe in them. But it was not real believing that she had in them; it was the sort of believing that you have in things in dreams. Her love was given to my mother and to my father -- and to me, too, though not in the way that I wanted it -- and we were the true kinsfolk of her heart. On our side, we all so loved her, and made her feel so truly that she was our very own, that the thought of her being a nobody's child never had a chance to get into her mind. And her own fancies about herself -- always that her own dream people were great people in the dream land where they lived -- kept her from seeing the other chance of the matter: that they as well might be mean people, who would put shame on her should ever she come to know who they were. Into her head that cruel thought never got until Grace Gryce put it there; and put there with it the crueller thought that her being a nobody's child was what made John stand off from her, he thinking her not fit to be his wife.