I

ON THE morning of the last day of October, several years after it was decided that Mermaid should live with Keturah Smiley in Blue Port, a thin, pleasant-faced boy stopped in front of Keturah Smiley’s house and whistled. Thereupon a girl of eleven slipped out of the second front door of the house, the front door that faced the street from a jog on the south side of the building, and ran out to meet him. She was as tall as the boy, and he was thirteen; she had long and slightly curling hair of so coppery a red as almost to match the polished mahogany in Keturah Smiley’s tight-shut front parlour. She had a very white skin, accentuated by three freckles of varying size on and about her straight little nose. The firm and rounded chin was without a dimple, but two dimples showed in her cheeks as she smiled, and she was smiling now; and her blue eyes were of that brilliant and flashing blue that is to be seen, as seamen say, “off soundings.” People who had occasion to say much to Mary Smiley, whom everyone in Blue Port called Mermaid, were frequently deceived by her eyes. The blue of them was so light that it seemed shallow, nothing more than the reflection of the day’s sunshine or the quicksilvering on two round little mirrors reflecting the merry heart within her. Only a mariner, after all, could be expected to guess that the very brightness and blueness was a sign of unfathomable depths.

“Good morning, Richard Hand, Jr.,” said the girl.

“Howdy, Mermaid,” retorted the boy.

They looked at each other a moment and smiled. They had become chums at school on the day they discovered an uncle in common. But Hosea Hand of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, known as Ho Ha, was Dick Hand’s real uncle, the brother of his father, whereas he was only Mermaid’s uncle by adoption.

“To-night’s the night,” said the boy, amicably offering a jawbreaker. Mermaid accepted the candy and said, with her mouth full, “I’ve unfastened most of ’em, so if the wind doesn’t blow and make them bang, they’ll be all ready for you. All you’ll have to do is unhinge them. Do you suppose you can do that?”

“Sure,” said Dick. “They’re just ordinary shutters. Maybe a little rusted.”

“I oiled some of them while she was up street yesterday,” the girl reassured him.

They were conspiring, as a Hallowe’en prank, to detach as many shutters as possible from Keturah Smiley’s tightly shuttered house; and particularly, the shutters were to be got off the windows of the sacred, sealed front parlour. In the three years or more that Mermaid had been living with Cap’n Smiley’s sister these shutters had been unfastened but twice a year: for a few hours in spring and a few hours in fall at the time of Keturah Smiley’s semi-annual housecleaning. For six months, from spring to fall, and again for six months, from fall to spring, the front parlour and most of the other rooms of the house lay in darkness. It seemed impossible that anything, even dust, could enter there, but dust there always was when cleaning time came. At which Mermaid used to wonder greatly, and Keturah Smiley to rage.

“Where do you suppose it comes from?” the girl would ask Miss Smiley.

“I don’t know where it comes from, but I know where it’s going to,” Keturah replied, with such a savage accent as to make her remark almost profane.

“Hell?” inquired Mermaid.

Miss Smiley straightened up and looked at her sternly.

“I was only asking a question,” explained Mermaid. “I wouldn’t think of saying ‘hell’ except to ask a question. But any one who says ‘hell’ is asking a big question, isn’t he, Miss Smiley?”

The funny child, as some folks in Blue Port called her, was not expressing her doubt for the first time. She had first shocked a Sunday School teacher with it. The Sunday School teacher had spoken to Keturah Smiley but had regretted it immediately, for Keturah had said:

“Well, what’s the matter? Can’t you convince her there’s a hell? That’s your job! Why put it on me?”

So now when Mermaid put the general inquiry as to whether any one saying “hell” were not asking a big question, Keturah merely gazed at her darkly and replied:

“Most likely he’s answering one about himself.”

This tickled Mermaid. She renewed an old controversy concerning the front parlour.

“What’s the use of singing, as we do at Sunday School, ‘Let a Little Sunshine In,’ if the shutters are always fastened?” she demanded. “How can you expect me to stand up and sing, ‘There’s Sunshine in My Heart To-day,’ Miss Smiley, when there’s not even sunshine in the house?”

Keturah snorted. “My heart is not as big as my house,” she answered. “Sunshine in some people’s hearts, like sunshine in some people’s houses, would show up a good deal that would better be hidden.”

Mermaid’s blue eyes shone, even in the semi-darkness. From the very first she had liked living with her Dad’s sister, despite that sister’s dark moods and bleak rages, because Keturah Smiley had a gift for saying sharp, true things, and saying them so you remembered them. She had not been unkind to the girl and had even shown a certain grudging liking for her as Mermaid, whether from some natural gift or from crossing blades in conversational fencing, developed a faculty for thinking her own thoughts and putting them in her own words—and more and more the right words.

They had many duels, and Keturah Smiley did not always win them. She early found in the child a streak of obstinacy as pronounced as her own. When Mermaid was convinced of her right Keturah might be able to silence her, but she would not be able to move her. And sometimes, to her dumb astonishment, Miss Smiley found herself giving ground.

She had had to yield in quite a number of instances. When the eight-year-old girl had come to live in Blue Port she had refused to sleep with Miss Smiley, and Keturah had been forced to open a small bedroom for her after the night when the child had run out of the house and fastened herself in the woodshed. Mermaid had declined to walk two miles in the noon recess of school and Keturah found herself putting up a lunch and having the hot meal of her day at suppertime. This had irked her a good deal, for Mermaid would not merely walk but run two miles at play. The girl refused outright to wear to school a man’s old coat fixed over as a jacket. She was as contrary as possible, it seemed to Keturah, about her clothes. After repeated quarrels on the subject, in the last of which Mermaid had threatened to appeal to her Dad the next time he came over from the beach, Miss Smiley gave in. For it was true that her brother gave her money to clothe the child, and she knew him well enough to know that he would make her account for every cent of it. Keturah Smiley was strictly honest, but it galled her to put money on any one’s back. She would not even buy a mustard plaster, though she would buy those mustard plasters which went by the name of first mortgages—when she could get them sufficiently cheap. But she did not starve the girl; she set a good table. She was stingy with money and affection, but not with food and principles.

In three years she had come to respect her brother’s adopted daughter, and sometimes to wonder where the girl got her firmness of character and general good humour. Keturah had never seen her in tears. Once, when she had been so angered as to lift her hand with a threat to strike Mermaid, the girl, without wincing, had said quietly:

“If you hit me I’ll go away.”

She had not said she would tell her father. She had never, in any of their disputes, threatened to appeal to Cap’n Smiley except in the long dispute about what she should have to wear. And she had explained that at the time by saying: “It’s only that Dad is buying them. If he says you’re right, that’ll settle it.”

Keturah never reopened the argument. She put the money in the girl’s hand.

“All right, Missy, spend the last cent and wear ribbons!”But Mermaid had insisted on Miss Smiley’s going with her to the shop, and had followed her advice on the quality of the goods, which Keturah shredded with her fingers along the selvage and bit, a thread at a time, with her very sound (and very own) teeth. Mermaid had then made her own selection of styles and patterns, and on the way home had handed Keturah $5 with the remark: “Will you send that to the savings bank in Patchogue for me?”

“It might have been twice as much,” was Keturah’s only remark.

“And it might have been twice as little. And I might be half as happy,” Mermaid exclaimed. “Would you be twice as happy if you had twice as much money, Miss Smiley?”

“I’d be willing to try and find out,” said Keturah, sententiously.

Mermaid looked at her speculatively. “If there’s a chance of it, I’ll help you all I can to get rich!” she declared with so much seriousness that Keturah was uncertain how to take her, and so took her in silence.

Probably Mermaid’s words were not really so ironical as they sounded. The girl was generally in earnest when she was not plainly in fun; as children usually are. She had only the vaguest notion of Miss Smiley’s means, and a very vivid notion of her money-stinting ways; Mermaid, however, liked her Dad’s sister in spite of the difficulties of living with her. Miss Smiley was “square” for all her harshness and even hardness; she said cutting things which were, however, never mean, and seldom really unkind. She could be wrathful, but she did not sneer, and she had only scorn for those who sneered at her. Very little mercy, but a rigid adherence to what she thought just, distinguished Keturah in the girl’s eyes. And no one, Mermaid concluded, could live with Miss Smiley and not be struck by the fact that she was thoroughly unhappy. What would make her happy Mermaid had not the least idea; but if the child could have given it to the woman she would have done it, even at some cost to herself. For she was a generous child and she felt generosity all about her, guarding her, befriending her, helping her. Her Dad’s and her uncles’ liberality to her always touched her heart. She knew now, at the age of eleven, that her Dad was not really her Dad and that her uncles were not related to her by blood or marriage. She knew she was a nameless child of unknown lineage, washed ashore from the wreck of the ship by whose name she was known. Everyone except Miss Smiley called her Mermaid; Miss Smiley called her Mary when she called her by name at all, or “Missy,” when Mermaid had irritated her. From the first the girl had called the woman Miss Smiley; it had never occurred to her to address her as “Aunt Keturah,” and no one, not even her Dad, had suggested it.

II

In the evening of the day when Mermaid ran out to meet young Dick Hand on the sidewalk, sprites were abroad. As if it had conspired with Dick and Mermaid, the wind refrained all day long from blowing and rattling Keturah Smiley’s unfastened shutters, and thus giving the two youthful conspirators away. But at night there came a wrenching sound, as if the broadside of the house were being ripped off. Keturah Smiley gave an exclamation and jumped to her feet. She rushed from the room and returned a moment later carrying a pistol.

Mermaid saw it and screamed. Then she flung herself at the woman.

“No, no! Miss Smiley,” she implored in little gasps. “It’s only boys! It’s only Hallowe’en!”

“Nonsense,” Keturah retorted, holding the pistol out of reach and checking the girl with her other hand. “I’m not going to murder ’em. I’m only going to frighten ’em into behaving themselves, and leaving my property alone!”

She moved quickly to the door, opened it, and fired two shots. From the darkness came an awful cry, as of mortal pain, followed by whimpers and the sound of scurrying feet. Keturah became utterly pale, and her tall figure seemed to lose its rigidity.

“Do you suppose one of those boys could have been perched in the big maple?” she inquired, faintly. “I shot in the air!”

There was a great rushing about and the woman and girl finally went outside with a lantern. The light bobbed about under the maple and around the house, but no white, stricken face was illuminated by the rays; they heard no other cries, no moans; and except for the rustle of the fallen leaves they trod upon there was no sound. Gradually recovering herself in the chill air Keturah strode indoors, Mermaid following her. Miss Smiley, as her fright left her, became more and more indignant.

“It’s that Dick Hand’s boy,” she commented. “Always up to mischief, like his father. A bad lot, the Hands, all except Hosea, who’s a fool.”

At this mention of her Uncle Ho Mermaid pricked up her ears. Miss Smiley was in a talkative mood, seeking relief from her vexation. The girl could not refrain from asking, “Is Uncle Ho a fool?”

“Yes, he is, to have let his brother cheat him out of his rightful property all these years,” Keturah Smiley told her.

Mermaid felt a pang.

“Uncle Ho is awfully good to me,” she said, sadly. “I can’t have anything to do with Dick if his father cheated Uncle Ho.”

Keturah gave her a curious look.

“Don’t make other folks’ quarrels your quarrels, Mary,” she observed. “And while ‘the boy is father to the man,’ Dick Hand’s boy may be a better man than his father.”

“I won’t be friends with Dick if his father cheated Uncle Ho,” the girl persisted.

“You go on being friends with Dick,” Keturah advised her, “and leave me to deal with his father.”

A strange, grim expression was on her face, an expression which had more of satisfaction in it than Mermaid had ever observed before, an expression that was almost happy, and that was not unknown in Blue Port. The senior Richard Hand had seen it on the day when he first came to Keturah Smiley to borrow money. His brother, Hosea Hand, had never witnessed it; and Hosea Hand thought he knew every shade of Keturah Smiley’s countenance—a countenance that was singularly inapt at denoting the finer shades of feeling. For Hosea Hand had even seen a look of tenderness in those sharp eyes; he had seen that mouth, so firm at the corners, relax into smiles at the smile he gave her. Once upon a time Hosea Hand had been young, and once upon a time Keturah Smiley had been young, and it was about that time that Hosea Hand’s brother—of whom a reasonable doubt might be entertained as to whether he had ever been young at all—that Dick Hand, the older, had come between two lovers.

In the morning three shutters were gone from the front parlour windows and the streaming sunshine had already, according to Keturah Smiley’s emphatic pronouncement, begun to fade the old rose carpet. What was worse, the shutters could not be found, though what appeared to be their ashes lay, still smouldering, in a lot a quarter of a mile away. Keturah poked through the black remains and fished out a peculiarly shaped hinge, adding to her observations of the evening before on the badness of the Hands. But she expressed no intention of putting her hand in her pocket to buy new window coverings. With a wrench that bade fair to take them from their rollers she pulled down the parlour shades. Yet a spell had been broken. The sacred room could never regain its dark repose. Mermaid, dusting the mahogany “deacon’s chairs,” ventured discreetly to raise the shades a little at the bottom, and gradually they rose higher and higher until they shielded the upper sashes only. An agreeable light streamed into the room and lit up the curios brought back from his sea voyages by Captain John Hawkins, husband of Keturah Hawkins and master of the clipper ship China Castle, curios that Keturah Smiley had inherited from Keturah Hawkins along with the house and her aunt’s land and money. Though not more wonderful than the full-rigged ship which Uncle Ho had carved in the glass bottle, these heirlooms were perceptibly more precious.

There was a jade Buddha which, on its first appearance in Blue Port fifty years earlier, had administered its shock to the Christian ladies of the Missionary Society, and had long been retired into oblivion. There was a collection of swords and cutlasses with which Keturah Smiley might have defended herself against all Blue Port advancing against her. On a mantel were ivory ornaments, intricately carved, and on either side of the fireplace were mammoth elephants’ tusks. Gold gleamed from damascened swords; silver bands shone more coldly from the tusks; some copper vessels on the floor dully reflected the unaccustomed daylight; but the precious stones which had once enhanced the beauty of these relics of far ports had been removed from their settings and their fires smothered forever in the feathers of a pillow on Keturah Smiley’s four-poster bed.

Mermaid used to look at the empty sockets and express sorrow that all these must once have held jewels which had been lost. She took an imaginative joy in restoring them, in her mind’s eye, to their rightful places, and in deciding just what gem belonged with every background. She had a sense in these matters, and she never enshrined a diamond where a ruby should have been bleeding.

Of the permanent results of their Hallowe’en pranks she apprised thirteen-year-old Dick Hand when they met at school. She told him of some of the treasures brought to light, but she said nothing of the value of them and she never spoke of the vanished jewels. She was curious, however, about the cry of pain and the whimpering that had frightened Miss Smiley on the night of the raid. Dick, who was a merry boy, laughed. “Oh, we knew she’d fire a pistol in the air; she’s done it before. I just made those noises to scare her,” he explained.

Then, as Mermaid laughed with him, the boy became suddenly earnest. He looked at the girl with an air of surprise.

“Say, Mermaid, you’re an awful nice girl,” he said, and looking at her he slowly reddened. In a moment he recovered himself and finished successfully, “An awful nice girl to be living with that—that—old cat!”

Mermaid was really indignant. She told him so, and then she left him, which was not what he wanted at all. He hardly knew what he wanted. As for Mermaid, she was too incensed to be observant; she was certainly not aware that he wanted anything. The boy stood looking after her faintly dismayed, but a good deal more perplexed. Then he scratched his head, gave a whistle to another boy across the street, and sang out: “Hey, Tom! Did you find out who that new feller is on your street?”

Young Tom Lupton, son of Tom Lupton of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, and therefore one of Mermaid’s cousins by courtesy in the queer relationships that sprang out of her rescue from the surf, waggled his head.

“C’m over and I’ll tell you all about him,” he invited.

Dick crossed the street and punched Tom’s head in a comradely fashion. They clinched, broke away, sparred a little, and then stopped, breathless and satisfied.

“Who is he?”

“Search me,” replied Tom Lupton 2nd, less in the voice of entreaty than with the air of a man making a succinct statement. “I tried to talk to him to-day over the fence and the guy only said ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to ever’thing. I got his name—that Guy.”

“What is it?” asked Dick, innocently.

“Guy,” answered Tom. “Ow!” He doubled over to protect his ribs from the impatient Mr. Hand. “I told yuh, Guy! Guy! His name is Guy! Like—like ‘Guy Mannering,’” explained Mr. Lupton, who was fifteen and didn’t look it, and was taking English I in Patchogue High School, and didn’t speak it.

“Mannering, what sort of a name is that?” demanded Mr. Hand.

“It isn’t Mannering, it’s Vanton,” said Tom, wisely not trying to explain. Whereupon Mr. Hand, remarking, “You said it was Mannering, I’ll Mannering you!” fell upon him afresh and they punched each other happily for several minutes until a shadow fell athwart them.

Stopping to see who approached, they were almost borne down by a huge, elderly man who walked with a peculiar tread, planting his feet firmly at each step and taking short steps. His preoccupied and lordly expression took no cognizance of the young men as he went through them, like a massive keel cutting in two a couple of sportive little waves.

Immense sidewhiskers, like studding sails, expanding the spread of his ample countenance, fluttered in the breeze. His weathered cheeks looked hard as the sides of a steel ship; there was a stony, distant stare in his eyes, wrinkled at their corners. He wore a coat cut like a huge boy’s reefer; there were brass buttons on it and his hands were thrust in the pockets.

The boys gazed at his wake, and when he was out of all possible hearing young Mr. Lupton nudged his companion.

“That’s him!” he exclaimed. “That’s Captain Vanton, this Guy’s father. You know they say he was master of a three skysail-yarder that made a passage from New York to Honolulu in 90 days. Doesn’t he look like a Damn-Your-Eyes?”

Dick agreed.

“A regular brute!” ejaculated Tom. “Must have wads of money. Built that house and it’s finished in mahogany and teakwood like a ship’s cabin—cost a fortune! He must have been in the slave trade, eh? Where does a sea captain get all that money, even if he’s been master of a clipper ship?”Dick, who reeked naught of the sea and cared less, didn’t know.

“That kid of his,” the garrulous Tom continued, “he’s a regular sissy. I s’pose his father frightens the life out of him. Probably flogs him with a rope’s end before breakfast.”

“Is he coming to school?” inquired young Mr. Hand.

“Naw. Leastways, I don’t believe so,” Tom responded. “He’d been by this time. They were here before school started. Why, it’s months since they moved into that house, and none of ’em has ever so much as spoke to anybody in Blue Port. They eat their meals at the Roncador House, but they never go anywhere. Not even to church.”

Everybody went to church in Blue Port. The information was astounding. The two boys agreed that a real mystery invested the Vantons; and as for Captain Vanton, he must have done something hellish to have so much money and hold so aloof and walk down Main Street as if it were his sacred quarterdeck on the queenly China Castle.

III

The China Castle! She had been a wonderful ship in her day, a Bath-built clipper. John Hawkins, husband of Keturah Hawkins, uncle by marriage of Keturah Smiley, had been the first master of her; Captain Vanton had come to her cabin much later, in the days of her decline. It was John Hawkins and not Buel Vanton who had made the passage from New York to Honolulu in 90 days. Young Tom Lupton had not known or remembered the name of the three skysail-yarder whose glory descended upon every master who trod her quarterdeck. Only a few persons in Blue Port, indeed, recalled anything when they heard that Captain Vanton had been master of the China Castle. “Eh?” said these old fogies to each other. “She was John Hawkins’s ship!” This Captain Vanton could not, of course, have been the mariner that John Hawkins was, for Captain John had sailed his fine, fast vessel to California, making quick passages, and afterward took her into the China trade for which she had been built. Nevertheless, out of a sense of politeness, these oldtimers had, on one occasion or another, attempted to address Captain Vanton; it was a sort of duty to let him know that he was not a total stranger in Blue Port. No man could have a better sponsor than a ship John Hawkins had sailed. They were frozen by Captain Vanton’s hard stare. At the mention of the China Castle he merely looked through their eyes and out the backs of their heads and into the bar of the Roncador House. At the various polite and hearty references to “Cap’n John Hawkins” he had but one course of behaviour: uttering a loud “Humph!” he would turn squarely on his heel, and lurch away evenly in the opposite direction.An exasperating man; did he think himself above everybody ashore, as if he were still the master of a vessel? Be hornswoggled if we’d go out of our way again to speak to such an uncivil devil. He could take his money and his pindling boy and his sick wife—she always appeared to be just convalescing—and shut himself up in his expensive house and be hanged to him. Why, Cap’n John Hawkins!—and then the oldtimers would go off into reminiscences all wool, a yard wide and the afternoon long, sitting about the stove in the store and postoffice in winter or in back-tilted chairs on the store porch in summer. When Captain Vanton came in for his mail there was a momentary silence, faces were carefully averted, and tobacco juice was sprinkled on the floor.

Buel Vanton never noticed the idlers. He never noticed anybody. Therefore Mermaid was stricken almost mute with astonishment one day when, answering a peremptory rap at the door, not the side front door, but the frontest front door leading into the small hall that gave into the front parlour, she opened it to find the bulky form of Captain Vanton standing before her. As usual he did not look at her, but merely asked in a loud, hard voice if this had been John Hawkins’s house. Mermaid affirmed it; he then asked if her mother were in.

“Miss Smiley is in. She is not my mother. I just live with her,” the girl replied. Captain Vanton made no response, but as he continued to stand there she added, “I will call her.”

She did not invite him to enter, and as she went in search of Keturah Smiley she murmured to herself, “Rude old man! She can ask him in, I won’t!”

Keturah Smiley, summoned, confronted the visitor and asked abruptly, “You wish to see me?”

Captain Vanton did not indicate whether he did or not. His eyes dropped for the merest instant and he replied: “I was told this was John Hawkins’s house.”

“It was in his lifetime,” said Keturah, shortly. “He was my uncle,” she added. “Mother’s sister’s husband.”

Captain Vanton made no reply. He said, as if it were relevant: “I commanded the China Castle after he left her. Some time after,” he added. “Did he ever speak of a man named King?” And now he looked Keturah Smiley straight in the eyes. Keturah gave his stare back.

“King?” she rasped. “I can’t say he did, and I can’t say he didn’t. What King?”

“First officer, Boston to Shanghai, third voyage,” answered Buel Vanton in his hard, uninflected tones. “Triced up by the thumbs and flogged before the crew by Captain Hawkins’s orders. First officer, too! Insulted Mrs. Hawkins.”

Keturah Smiley’s face settled into its severest lines.

“You’re likely mistaken,” she said with a bite in her words. “Captain Hawkins would never have flogged a man for that: he’d have killed him!”

“Did almost. Killing too easy. Better to flog. Torture,” declared Buel Vanton, reflectively. “Afterward Captain King. Knew him in San Francisco. Retired. Devil. Swore he’d get even. Then Captain Hawkins died. King heard of it. Near crazy. I’ve come to tell you he’s dead!”

“Dead?” echoed Keturah Smiley, who had become slightly confused by the visitor’s elliptical language. “Captain Hawkins is dead. Of course he’s dead, what of it?”

“Not Hawkins, King!” barked Captain Vanton from his impassive face framed in the spreading sidewhiskers. “He’s done you all the harm he ever will. All of you. He’s dead. ‘The King is dead. Long live the King!”’ He uttered a harsh sound, a bitter laugh. Turning squarely about he started off the porch and away from the house. Keturah Smiley, who had been eyeing him with amazement, suddenly called after him, “How do you know he’s dead?”

Captain Vanton half turned his head.

“Killed him myself,” he declared abruptly, and lurched away.

IV

Standing well back in the hall Mermaid had heard this extraordinary conversation. Now she slipped into the front parlour ahead of Miss Smiley, who stood, apparently forgetful or stunned, for two or three minutes in the open doorway. Then she closed the door with a bang, entered the front parlour, and went through it into the living room. She stood before the stove a moment, warming her hands. Her face was working and her mouth was twisting, but her lips remained closed. Mermaid looked at her with deep sympathy and with a certain terror at the memory of what she had just heard. Neither emotion drowned the awful curiosity within the girl to know what it had all been about. But she dared not ask questions.

In silence the two got their supper, in silence they ate it. Once Keturah Smiley sighed, once she spoke, but only to say: “Thank the Lord, John will be coming over to-morrow!”

Mermaid, who had been looking forward to this visit of her Dad, thinking he might give her a scooter ride on the smoothly frozen bay, said: “How rich do you suppose Cap’n Vanton is, Miss Smiley?”

Keturah looked at her absently.

“Not rich enough to buy an easy conscience, probably,” she replied, drily. Mermaid hesitated, and then took her courage in both hands.

“Miss Smiley, I heard some of what he said. I—I guess I heard most of it,” she said.

Keturah showed neither surprise nor anger. She looked at Mermaid attentively and there was a flicker of interest in her eyes as she asked: “Well, and what did you make of it?”

“He said he’d killed a Captain King!” the girl blurted out. “How could he do that and not be in jail for it?”

“Maybe he has been,” Keturah suggested.

“But then how could he be so rich?” persisted Mermaid.

“Maybe it isn’t his money,” Miss Smiley replied.

“It seems to be now.” Mermaid rested on the fact, solidly buttressed by all appearances.

“So it does,” agreed the woman.

But she was at some pains, the next day, to talk to her brother only after Mermaid had had her scooter ride and had gone out to do errands at the store.

“When he first spoke of ‘a man named King,’” Keturah explained to John Smiley, “I couldn’t make the connection. Then I remembered the entry about the flogging in Uncle John’s log of that passage. Aunt Keturah was with him on that voyage. The log only says that the mate refused to obey orders. I never heard Aunt Keturah utter a word of such a thing, but it’s perfectly possible; more than that, it’s likely. Mates, first mates, weren’t flogged before the crew for insubordination. There was something personal, I suspect. As for his—this fellow’s—having killed King, that’s neither here nor there with us. He said King had done us all the harm he ever would, but what harm did he ever do? Uncle John and Aunt Keturah lived to a peaceful old age and died comfortably in their beds—leastways, I suppose they were as comfortable as a person can be dying.”

But the “Captain King” struck a full chord of memory in John Smiley’s breast.

“Don’t you remember?” he cried. “That miserable devil we found on the beach after the wreck of the Mermaid, one of the crew? Remember I told you I sat up all night with him and that I made out from his delirious talking that a ‘Captain King’ had had the little girl, and had been sending her back to someone? He wanted to keep himself out of it and he wanted ‘forgiveness’—at any rate, that was one word in the letter we found in the pocket of the Mermaid’s skipper.” He was deep in the painful process of recollection. “But still I can’t make head nor tail of it,” he confessed. “This man King may have hated John Hawkins and been willing to do anything he could to hurt him, he may have hated Aunt Keturah, but they’re dead and that’s an end of them! As for his harming us, he never could have had a chance. And as he’s dead he’ll never get one. And that’s an end of him! Captain Vanton says he killed him, and probably if he did it was a good job. He must have thought that King had bothered us somehow. Thoughtful of him to come and assure us that the dirty dog’s dead. I suppose,” he continued, reflectively, “I might go see him and talk with him. Perhaps he may have learned something from King that will set us on the track of Mermaid’s people. I’ll go!”

Keturah was inclined to dissuade him.

“He thinks,” she said, with her usual shrewdness, “that we know something we don’t know, and that he does know. Or else,” she wavered, “he’s after something, and if we go after him we’ll be playing right into his hands. I don’t know——” She came to a dead stop for a moment, and a rare look of uncertainty, almost of panic, appeared in her eyes. “Better keep away, John. Better wait and see what he does. If he comes around here bragging of having killed another man I’ll ask him for the death certificate.” She had recovered her usual poise. And when her brother repeated his intention of calling on Captain Vanton she merely remarked:

“Well, I sha’n’t mind hearing how you’re received.”

The interview between Captain Vanton and John Smiley was extremely short and, to the keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, hopelessly baffling. Captain Vanton, with more courtesy than Keturah had shown him, ushered her brother into a room which resembled nothing so much as a ship’s cabin. He seated his visitor, but himself paced up and down the floor, a very fine floor which seemed to have been freshly scrubbed and holystoned until it was of the whiteness of an afterdeck. Cap’n Smiley came to the point at once.

“The little girl who lives with my sister is my adopted daughter,” he began. “She was rescued from the wreck of the Mermaid.” He went on to tell of the few decipherable words in the letter found on the body of the Mermaid’s skipper; then of the delirious sailor who had talked of “Captain King.” Captain Vanton paced to and fro in perfect silence. He seemed not to be paying attention, but to be thinking.

“Anything you may have learned that would help us to find out the child’s identity——” John Smiley began, and then he stopped with a sudden sinking of the heart. If Mermaid’s identity were established he would probably lose her! The thought gave him, as he afterward put it, “a turn.” He never finished his sentence, and while he was recovering himself Captain Vanton uttered his first words of the conversation.

“I know—knew of—the child,” he muttered. “He sent her back. Yes. No, I don’t know anything that would make matters any better than they are.” He did not look through Cap’n Smiley, as was his customary way with people, but seemed to avoid his eye. He frowned at the floor as he might have frowned at the deck if the holystoning and cleaning had not been thorough. John Smiley, rising, thanked him and took his departure. The sense of relief at the thought that Mermaid would not be taken from him was so strong that he felt not in the least disappointed, but really grateful for Vanton’s reticence. Captain Vanton may even have thought him effusive in his thanks. Keturah Smiley heard her brother’s report of his failure with calmness.

“Did he wear the scalp at his belt?” she inquired.

Mermaid appearing, they all sat down and had a hot supper after which Cap’n Smiley and Mermaid played checkers and Keturah walked about with a yardstick in an effort to decide where she would have three shelves put up. She had a passion for shelves and drawers.

“What are these shelves to be for, Miss Smiley?” asked Mermaid, looking up from the board after she had beat her Dad for the third time.

“Medicine, most like,” Keturah, told her.

“Why not for our books?” Mermaid suggested.

“Bottles break,” said Keturah, concisely. “Do you prefer books to medicine? Not when you’re sick, I’ll warrant!”

“Yes, I do,” Mermaid insisted, and then she explained to her antagonist with a smile:

“You see, Dad, it’s because—it’s because books can make you happy while you’re dying, but medicine can only make you miserable while you’re getting well!”

Keturah gave the girl a look in which a skilled observer might have detected something resembling admiration.

“What an upside-down mind you have, child!” she said. “But then,” she allowed, “you use it and do your own thinking!”

“I wish she’d do some of my thinking,” exclaimed Cap’n Smiley, looking ruefully at the checkerboard. “Appears to me as if I had been out-thunk again!” He liked the defeated, “ker-plunk” sound of this past participle of his invention, and always used it to describe Mermaid’s victories.

Mermaid got up, went to the pantry, came back with a pan of sugared crullers, offered her Dad one, took one herself, put up the pan, and then cuddled contentedly against his arm. “I made them myself,” she murmured.

Her Dad stroked her hair. It was remarkably like the colour his own had been before thirty years of beach sunshine—and other things—had bleached the colour out of it.

“What are you going to be when you grow up, Mermaid?” he asked, dreamily.

“I shall try to make you a good home and keep you happy,” she assured him. “I’m knitting the slippers you’ll wear, now.”

They hugged each other in anticipation of their peaceful old age together, and went to bed.

V

Sometimes it isn’t what you don’t know about people but what you do know that makes them mysterious, as Mermaid once said.

She did not say it respecting the senior Dick Hand but she might well have done so. Richard Hand First was not only his proper designation but his motto, his war-cry, his watchword, and his slogan. Richard Hand first and everybody else nowhere, just about summed up the golden rule in Blue Port. Richard made the rule and Blue Port lived up to it.

If Blue Port had been a pretty good-sized town, like near-by Patchogue, with a couple of mills, two or three banks, an electric light company, and other rudiments of an American municipality, Dick Hand would have owned them all—not outright, of course, but as the heaviest shareholder and the preferred creditor. But Blue Port had none of these things. Blue Port had only a two-three of stores, a justice of the peace (Judge Hollaby), an unorganized oyster industry, a faded little railroad station, and a postoffice. Nearly all the people in Blue Port got their living on or from the Great South Bay. They went oystering, fishing, eeling, clamming, duck shooting. They kept, some of them, a cow and a few pigs; all of them raised vegetables. Thus there was plenty to eat. There was not so much to wear, but there was enough. As for making money, mostly no one made any money. There was no way to. A few hundred dollars in cash, to buy a few clothes and pay, perhaps, a low rent, was enough for a whole family from one year’s end to the other. Such a place might be considered, and rightly, to offer very restricted opportunities for the capitalist, but Dick Hand made it do.He was not a daring financier. For years he had lived on a farm in the middle of Long Island, a farm in semi-hilly country, the farm left him by his father. It had to be worked hard, and when, after some dozen years of labour, the chance came to Dick Hand to sell it at a fabulous figure, he lost no time in doing so. A wealthy New Yorker had come along and bought the place simply because he saw in the lie of the land possibilities for a corkingly good private golf course. The course was never laid out. The New Yorker died while still quarrelling with his architect over the plans for a $200,000 summer “cottage,” and his executors and heirs looked ruefully at the large tract of land which had been his latest whim and which was difficult to “turn over”—even with a plough. But Dick Hand had received $20,000 in cold cash for 200 acres. He was satisfied.

It was an impressive lot of money. It would have been greeted respectfully in Patchogue, and even in larger places. But the sudden possession of so much riches made Mr. Hand more cautious than ever. How to make it grow fastest?

He had had enough of land. By most wonderful fortune, he had been enabled to convert land into money. It was a miracle. Water had been turned into wine; he would not depend upon it happening again. His wife, who had always been submissive to him, ventured a single suggestion:“Now would be a good time to straighten out matters with Hosea,” she remarked. Dick Hand looked at her coldly. She went on, uncomfortably: “I s’pose ’twouldn’t take so much. It wasn’t more’n $2,500, his share of father’s estate, was it?”

“He had no share of the estate,” her husband answered, shortly. “For God’s sake, Fanny, how often have I got to tell you that there wa’n’t nothing for him.” Under stress of emotion Mr. Hand used colloquial speech. “The will read plain: I was to have the farm and he was to have the rest to do as he pleased with, but after father’s debts had been paid there wa’n’t nothing. I stood ready to mortgage the farm if nec’ssary to give him what he’d oughter had,” said the man, virtuously and untruthfully—doubtless he thought his wife would readjust her recollection accordingly—“but he run away and went to sea. Stayed away for years, and me struggling with the farm.” Mr. Hand began gradually doing himself justice as a heavily laden, plodding, self-sacrificing figure. “When he finally showed up I offered to do what was right and he sneered at me, the ongrateful and onnatural brother. I says to Hosea, ‘I’m ready to forget and forgive. Bygones kin be bygones.’ He was courting Keturah Smiley. It was before her aunt died, and she hadn’t a cent. O’ course it was plain she’d have prop’ty some day, though no one could foresee she’d have all the Hawkins’s money. John Smiley hadn’t married that Mary Rogers then. So after I’d talked with Hosea and offered to do right by him—and more’n right, considering how he’d acted—I went to Keturah Smiley, and told her just how things stood.”

“Oh, Richard, you hadn’t ought to have done that,” Mrs. Hand murmured. “You had ought to have kept out of it.”

“Maybe I had, maybe I had,” retorted her husband. “But I was never one to reckon the consequences of doing a neighbourly act. I was trying to do the square thing, and more’n square, by Hosea. So I went to Keturah and I says to her: ‘Hosea won’t take this money. Of course,’ I says, ‘there’s no claim upon me for it, and never was a valid claim, but I always wanted to do the utmost by the boy and I want to be generous to the man; even if he has behaved badly and said things to me he oughter be ashamed of, and will be some day, I don’t hold it against him. I harbour no resentment,’ I says, ‘and if he won’t take this money I wish you would. Every one knows,’ I went on, ‘that you’ll have prop’ty some day and you can pay me back then if you feel you should. Or,’ I continued, wanting to make it as easy as I could for her, ‘you can give me your note o’ hand for the amount at six per cent., and I’ll promise you it won’t leave my hands. I’ll shave it for nobody,’ I says, reassuring her, ‘and nobody need ever know about it unless you want to tell Hosea about it afterward to bring him to a proper appreciation of the onnatural things he said to his brother.’”

Mrs. Hand, who had been clasping and unclasping her fingers, exclaimed: “But, Richard! Don’t you think ’twas a mistake to go to Keturah with it? A girl is so likely to misunderstand such matters.”

A look of inscrutable sorrow crept into Mr. Hand’s crafty eyes. He hunched up his shrunken body and nodded earnestly.

“Yes-yes!” he confirmed, using a characteristic ejaculation of the Long Islander. “Keturah was never the woman to understand things in any but her own way. She flared right up at me and said some hard things. I won’t repeat’em, though I remember some of ’em to this day. For one thing,” he went on, disregarding his promise of the breath before, “she accused me of trying to cheat Hosea—to cheat him! She p’tended to think I was trying to keep from Hosea what was rightfully his, when I was right there trying to give it back! She says to me: ‘I’ve heard of folks who wanted to eat their cake and have it, too, but you’re the first ever I see that wanted to give someone else his bite and have it back.’ Then she cried out: ‘I wouldn’t marry a man with a brother so mean as you!’ I went away a good deal upset, for I was real consarned to see her married to Hosea and them both happy. Hosea didn’t have nothing, but she was sure to have plenty from her aunt, and I figgered ’twould be money in the family.” Mr. Hand shook his head regretfully and a sigh whistled between his teeth.

Mrs. Hand smoothed her apron. After a few moments’ silence she observed: “Well, I s’pose it’s all for the best.” It was her favourite observation, and on the philosophy compressed into that one short sentence she had managed to live, hardly but not so unhappily, with Richard Hand for these many years. She wanted to ask him what he was going to do with the extraordinary sum of $20,000 of which he was now possessed, but she knew he would not tell her. Afterward, she would learn, little by little. She did not have to worry, for he was not likely to lose it. She fell to speculating as to whether he would give her enough to buy a black silk dress for Sundays—but it was an idle speculation.... Her thoughts went along in an ineffectual fashion until she rose to get supper.

Her husband ate in silence, undisturbed by his boy’s chatter about the people of Blue Port, to which they had just removed. His mind was already occupied with the possibilities of $20,000 carefully handled, as he would handle it. He would not buy land, he would buy people. He would look about for good mortgages that could be picked up cheap. There must be a few Keturah Smiley had not got hold of. He would go slow and keep money in the savings bank for a while, even though it yielded him only a miserable four per cent. If something good came along he would have it handy. Perhaps he could organize some industry and have people working for him directly. He liked to drive people. The oyster industry, for example—there ought to be something in that for a man who would use a little capital and get control of the trade. Blue Port oysters were famous the world over. A little legal work would be necessary; the thought of paying a lawyer hurt him, but there were papers that would have to be drawn up, articles of incorporation, etc. He would stop in and talk with Judge Hollaby to-morrow.

The upshot of this meditation ultimately was the formation of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, Richard Hand, president; Horace Hollaby, vice-president and secretary; Richard Hand, treasurer. The company gradually obtained liens on most of the boats in which the men of Blue Port went forth to dredge the oyster beds. It acquired these beds. There were also free beds, belonging to the township, but as Richard Hand’s company came to own the boats it suffered less and less competition. Everything went on about as before; the only difference was that everybody came to be in debt to Richard Hand and worked for him. The only person in Blue Port who remained independent of him was Keturah Smiley.

VI

Mermaid, hurrying down the street from school, did not notice a boy coming out of the side street on which young Dick Hand lived. The boy was walking along with a most unboyish air. His head was down and he looked up too late to avoid a collision. It nearly knocked Mermaid’s breath out of her. When she could talk she accepted his confused apology, and smiled.

“You’re Guy Vanton, aren’t you?”

He was a short boy with very black hair, a snub nose, and a pale face. His eyes, which were brown, had something uncanny about them; Mermaid was struck with their resemblance to the eyes of wild animals. She had seen deer with eyes like that. The boy stood before her with his cap in his hand; he was somehow not in the least like Dick Hand or Tommy Lupton or any of the other Blue Port boys. He seemed to have very good manners and to be politely exercising them. Mermaid unconsciously assumed her own.

“Guy Vanton, yes, mademoiselle.” The French word aroused Mermaid to a high pitch of curiosity, and the immediate effect of her heightened curiosity was to make her still more polite.

“I—I beg your pardon,” the boy repeated. “It was all my fault. I was not looking where I was going, mademoiselle.”She noticed that he spoke English without the Blue Port twang, but also without a foreign accent; his speech was like that of one or two of the schoolteachers she had had.

He seemed about to replace his cap and hurry away. He made a little bow to her—from the waist. Mermaid had seen the bow before. Dickie Hand had learned it in a children’s dancing class at Patchogue. She smiled at young Mr. Vanton, who was so eager to get along. She had no intention he should go until they were fairly acquainted.

“You speak French?”

“Mais oui, mademoiselle!” His uncanny eyes fixed her for a moment and his pale face flushed a little.

“Oh, I don’t speak it,” Mermaid explained, hastily, whereupon he looked down at the ground, as if he had lost interest. “What was that you just said?”

“I said: ‘But yes!’”

“I wish I knew it,” she exclaimed. “I should love to study it, but I don’t think they teach it even in High School at Patchogue.”

He said, without looking at her: “I learned it in Paris. I—we used to live there. My mother——” He stopped.

Mermaid said, sympathetically: “She’s an invalid, isn’t she?”

“Oh, that isn’t—I mean—why, why, yes. She is—she has to walk with a crutch. And then, only a little.” His confusion was so evident that Mermaid felt sorry for him. With true feminine instinct she decided that he must suffer some more so that ultimately she might help him. She knew he did not go to school, she knew that he lived all alone, shut up in that expensive house, surrounded by gloomy evergreens, which must be as sunless as Miss Smiley’s front parlour had been once on a time. He lived there with a crippled mother and a formidable father, a retired sea captain who was undoubtedly a stern disciplinarian. He was pale and undersized. Mermaid had heard stories of sea captains all her remembering life and knew them to be a peculiar race of men. Her imagination worked rapidly on the problem presented by Guy Vanton, and she concluded, perhaps somewhat rashly, that his father had spent most of his money on the mahogany and teakwood of the parlour and fed his boy on ship’s biscuits and water. At any rate, he looked it. But his eyes fascinated her. Considering briefly the means of further advancing their acquaintance she decided that he should teach her French. In turn, she would ask him home with her to supper, and see that he got a square meal.

“I wonder if you wouldn’t teach me French?”

Guy Vanton looked surprised, but then an expression of pleasure came into the brown eyes. He nodded. Mermaid continued: “I could come over in the afternoon, sometimes, when I haven’t to help Miss Smiley clean house. We could be very still and not bother your mother. And sometimes you could come to our house. I’m sure Miss Smiley wouldn’t mind. I bring Dickie Hand there and she gives him cookies though she hates his father like anything.”

They were walking along the street together. Young Mr. Vanton had got his cap back on his head at last, but he walked stiffly, a little deferentially, his body half turned toward the girl. Mermaid chattered along easily on whatever themes came into her head, occasionally punctuating her talk with a question calling for no answer more elaborate than a “Yes” or a “No.” She was much gratified when Dick Hand and Tommy Lupton stopped their regular afternoon pastime of punching each other’s heads to stare across the street at her escort. She heard Dickie say to Tom: “Well, will you look? Girls make me sick!”

As if this were the very effect she desired to produce, Mermaid was remarking to the Vanton heir: “That’s Dick Hand over there, and Tommy Lupton. You know them, don’t you? Dick is thirteen and Tommy’s fifteen. I’m only eleven, but I’m as big as either of them. You’re fifteen, aren’t you?”

“I’m seventeen,” he divulged. Mermaid stood still in her astonishment.

“Seven-teen!” she gasped. “Why, but you’re no bigger than Dickie—though you know French and he doesn’t, and you know a lot more than he does and are lots—lots nicer,” she added, by way of retrieving her blunder. “But you won’t want anything to do with me,” she said with honest candor. “You’ll think I’m only a little girl. I suppose I am.”

He did not seem ready to cast her off as infantile and beneath his notice.

“I am too small,” he admitted. “I was not so small in Paris—I mean, the boys at school there were not so large as fellows of the same age here. I was average height. Here I’m a little—runt.”

“What a lot you must have seen,” Mermaid marvelled. “I hope you’ll tell me all about it. You can do that and teach me French that way, can’t you? I’ve never been anywhere except here and on the beach. You know I came ashore in a shipwreck.”

She told him about the wreck, what she had heard of it from her Dad and other men of the Lone Cove Station; of her home with Keturah Smiley, and of life on the beach. Then she spoke of Captain John Hawkins and the clipper ship China Castle.

“You know your father commanded her afterward.”

Guy did not seem to know it. “He never talks about his ships,” the boy explained. With the help of some questions from Mermaid, he told her about himself.

He had been born in San Francisco and had lived there for some years. In the Presidio section of the city. As he talked of the town Mermaid’s face took on a puzzled look.“It’s the funniest thing,” she declared. “Do you know, I have a feeling that I lived there once on a time. It seems as if it came back to me, as if I just sort of half-remembered—— You know the Mermaid, the ship I was aboard, came from San Francisco.”

After they left San Francisco, the Vantons had gone to live in Paris. Guy’s father had then given up definitely all idea of going to sea again.

“He had really never had a ship since I was born,” the boy explained. “But he kept thinking, up to the time we went to Paris, that he would take another command. My mother——” he hesitated, with a trace of the confusion he had shown before in speaking of her, and then went on: “We had plenty of money, and so there was no need for him to go, but in San Francisco he kept thinking of it, and every day he would walk down to the foot of Market Street and along the waterfront and look at all the ships. Sometimes he would go aboard them and talk to the captains. He used to take me with him. It was very interesting. Ships from all over the world—British, Japanese, American, German, French, Norwegian, Russian and a lot more. He would take me on board the square-riggers and teach me the ropes. ‘This,’ he would say, ‘is the fore t’ gallant halyard. This is the fore royal sheet. This is the fore topmast stays’l sheet. Now what is this?’ I always got it wrong and it used to make him terribly angry. Then he would tell me to go aloft. I liked that, because you could always get such a splendid view of San Francisco Bay and the city, built on hills, and the mountains over in Marin County, with Oakland and Alameda and all the other places spread out before you.”

“Weren’t you dizzy?” Mermaid asked.

“Only the first time.”

They had reached Keturah Smiley’s house. Mermaid invited little, old Mr. Vanton in. She gave him crullers and coffee, made him acquainted with Miss Smiley, and then said good-bye to him at the gate. It was agreed that they should meet the next afternoon pour parler FranÇais. As the French instructor hurried homeward he lit a cigarette. This was observed by the Messrs. Hand and Lupton, who were considerably dazed.

“And I called him a sissy,” murmured Mr. Hand.

“D’ye know what I think?” exclaimed his side partner. “He’s a foreigner, that’s what he is, a cigarette-smoking foreigner. Mermaid ought not to have anything to do with a fellow like that,” Tommy concluded, virtuously, and with the sense of the protecting male.

VII

Mermaid and Monsieur Guy Vanton made friends with each other quickly, aided, perhaps, by the graces of the French language. At eleven years it is not hard to learn French, especially if your instructor speaks with a pure accent and makes conversation in it the order of the day. Mermaid found that Guy did not go to school because his father didn’t wish him to, for reasons not given. Guy said he didn’t know what was back of his father’s objections, unless it was that he would have to go away from home. “You see, I’ve had the equivalent of high school,” he told Mermaid. “It would have to be college—or maybe a year somewhere to get ready for college. I don’t much care. I read a lot—we’ve heaps of books—and I—I write sometimes,” he confessed, diffidently.

“What do you write?” Mermaid ventured. “Say it in French,” he reminded her and after he had corrected her question so put, he replied in French: “Mostly poetry.”

He got quite red, so that Tommy Lupton, who had been dishonourably spying from behind a shrub in the next yard, was incensed.

“Some day I’m going to knock his block off,” Tommy told himself.

Afterward he accosted Mermaid down the street, greeting her calmly but with a touch of sadness in his tone. She was a nice, if misguided, girl; Tommy didn’t want to hurt her feelings but this business couldn’t be allowed to go on.

“Say, Mermaid,” he began, and then faltered a moment in the performance of his unpleasant duty. “We—we never see anything of you any more these days,” he finished. It was not just the thing, but it was, perhaps, best to lead up to the point gradually.

Mermaid seemed unaware that anything was wrong.

“Come down to the house, Tommy, and I’ll give you a cookie,” she invited him sweetly.

“I don’t believe I want a cookie. I don’t believe I want anything to eat,” answered Mr. Lupton, seriously.

Mermaid looked at him with attention. “You aren’t sick, are you?” she said, anxiously. “There’s two cases of scarlet fever in Patchogue, I heard. You ought not to be going there to high school if you feel that way.”

Indignation at the turn the conversation was taking overcame Mr. Lupton. He did not want to talk about himself but about Mermaid, and particularly about the dangerous acquaintances—well, acquaintance—she was cultivating. He abandoned the possible diplomatic approaches to the subject and blurted out: “What do you want to have anything to do with that Vanton feller, for, anyway, Mermaid? If we fellers don’t have anything to do with him I shouldn’t think you’d—you’d——” He stuck hopelessly.

Mermaid’s very bright blue eyes were on him and he found it difficult to collect his thoughts and present his argument.

“Shouldn’t think you’d—have him around,” he concluded, unhappily.Mermaid lifted her chin and her eyes flashed.

“I’d like to know, Tommy Lupton, what you know about him, anyway!”

Just the opening Mr. Lupton craved. He poured it all out eagerly.

“Why—why, he’s a regular sissy, Mermaid, and you know it. He’s a—a hermit. I mean he never mixes with us fellers, and of course we’re glad of it; we wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Tommy assured her, not bothering the logic. “He’s some kind of a foreigner, probably a dago,” he inferred, darkly. “He smokes cigarettes.” Mr. Lupton, who smoked only cornsilk in secret, saw the distinction clearly. “If you don’t look out some of these days he’ll be putting his arm around you!”

He stopped, appalled at his own frankness. But Mermaid merely laughed.

“He’s not a foreigner; he only just speaks French. He lived in Paris and learned it there,” she said quite easily. “That doesn’t make him a foreigner; besides, he learned good manners, Tommy. And as for his not mixing with you and Dickie and the rest, he’s older and doesn’t go to school—and anyway, you never go near him. I don’t care if he does smoke. You smoke. Only you hide, and he doesn’t! I guess if he’s seventeen and has lived abroad where everybody smokes early he can smoke if he wants to. I guess if his father didn’t think it was all right he’d stop him. If he puts his arm around me and I need your help I’ll scream, Tommy, and when you come I’ll tell him you kissed me at your last birthday party! Will you fight him, Tommy? While he was in Paris he learned all about duelling, and you two can have a duel. I’ll steal one of the swords from our front parlour and you can practise with it.”

Mr. Lupton was perfectly red with rage and white with mortification. He was two colours, and presented an alarming spectacle. Mermaid, done with taunting, suddenly approached him and laid her hand on his arm.

“Don’t be mad, Tommy. I was only teasing. Of course he’s different from you and Dick, but he’s lived in strange places—in San Francisco and Paris—and he’s moved around a lot. And he has a sick mother and a queer father. You’d be funny in his place. And queer. And he’s seventeen, Tommy, and no bigger than you and I are! Don’t you think you could eat a cookie?” she asked, solicitously.

“It’s only—only that I think such a lot of you, Mermaid,” he protested. His natural dignity reasserted itself. “I’ll walk home with you.”

The procession formed, two abreast, and they went on toward Keturah Smiley’s. Mr. Lupton ate three cookies and an apple and examined, with an air of interest, the swords and cutlasses in the front parlour, which he had never handled before.“Does Vanton really know how to fight with a sword?” he ventured, curiously.

“He had fencing lessons. Not a sword, a rapier,” Mermaid explained. “A sharp point that you stick into the other man. I think I’ll get him to give me lessons.”

“What would a girl be doing with fencing lessons?” exclaimed Mr. Lupton, scornfully.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just exercise. It might be useful sometime,” said Mermaid, vaguely.

“You’re just thinking of something you two can do together.” Jealousy reawakened in Mr. Lupton’s bosom.

“Well, he writes poetry, and we can’t write poetry together.”

“No, but he can write it and read it to you,” the youth said, bitterly. “Wishy-washy stuff, poetry. All except ‘Marmion,’” he qualified.

“Oh, Tommy, don’t be foolish,” sighed the young woman.

An amusing thought struck Mr. Lupton.

“Wait till I tell Dick he writes poetry,” he cried. “Ow! Won’t he yell? Won’t he?

“Just like a foreigner to stab a man with a thing like this,” Tommy continued, imperilling the haircloth seat of one of the “deacon’s chairs” with an unskilful lunge.

At this Mermaid lost all patience.“He’s not a foreigner!” she snapped. “And if you think he can’t put up his fists you just try him some day. I’ll bet you’ll find you made a mistake!”

Mr. Lupton sulked for a moment, but recovered, and after borrowing a book and eating two more cookies took a calm departure. On the highway, however, the thoughts that had disturbed him returned.

“Just the same I’ll have to give him a good licking yet, I bet,” he muttered. He hoped supper would be ready, for he felt hungry after the strife and passions of the afternoon.

Richard Hand the elder had come to own all Blue Port with the exception of Keturah Smiley when the balance of power, if you could call it that, was altered, imperceptibly at first, by the advent of Captain Vanton.

“Buel Vanton, Buel Vanton,” said Dick Hand, fretfully, to his wife one morning some months after the studding-sail whiskers became a familiar sight in Blue Port. “Should like you to tell me who this Buel Vanton is.”

Mrs. Hand, whose frequent tattling of village gossip made her more valuable to her husband than he ever admitted, repeated such news as was current. She described, not quite accurately, the mahogany and teakwood parlour, expatiated on the invalid wife, who was never seen outdoors, referred to the small boy. It had got about that the boy was older than he looked, and the father more brutal than he spoke, and the wife as mysterious as she was invisible. The town figured that Captain Vanton flogged the boy, or had flogged him when he was little, thus arresting his growth; probably he had made his wife an invalid by his cruelty. Mrs. Hand repeated and worked speculative embroidery on the meagre facts and unsatisfying conjectures.

“Humph!” sneered Richard Hand, his eyes fixed on his plate. “How much money has he got?”

Mrs. Hand didn’t know. And what made things worse, there seemed absolutely no way of finding out. Captain Vanton didn’t own property in Blue Port, except a lot and the house he had built on it. He didn’t even have an account at a Patchogue bank. He sometimes made trips to the city, but they lived very simply. The only evidence of wealth, after all, was the costly fittings of that front parlour which no one in Blue Port had ever entered since the Vantons moved in. Mrs. Hand did not know of Cap’n Smiley’s short call. Keturah Smiley never met “with the ladies” and never talked any one else’s business unless it was her business, too.

Her husband meditated aloud:

“’F he has money,” he observed, “we might make some effort to get acquainted with them. You could call on his wife. And Dick,” with a glance at his son, “could make friends with his boy. I might stop the Captain on the street some day and ask him how he’s fixed to ’nvest a little money in shares of the Blue Port Bivalve Comp’ny.”

Dick Junior looked at his father rebelliously.

“Say, Pop,” he remarked, “I’m not a-going to have anything to do with that Guy Vanton for you nor nobody else. He’s—he’s a big softy!”

His father looked at the boy with his nearest approach to good nature.

“Maybe that girl that lives with Keturah Smiley—what’s her name?—some kind of fish—might tell you something about him.”

Young Mr. Hand choked on the coffee he was swallowing and rose from the table, though there were three steaming pancakes left of the morning’s pile.

“I don’t see why you insult Mermaid,” he said with a comical boyish rage in his voice. “She’s a—a—nice girl, even if that softy does get around her. Why—why, I wouldn’t think of asking her anything about that fellow. She might think I was jealous.”

Young Mr. Hand went out and wandered disconsolately down the street, thinking miserably of Mermaid and the three untouched pancakes. It was, however, incompatible with his wounded dignity to make overtures to either.

Old Richard Hand, shuffling down the street, looking at the sidewalk, perhaps to see where he was going, perhaps to see where someone else had been, did not observe a large, heavy craft also outward bound but in the opposite direction and on the other side of the thoroughfare. No signals were exchanged and Captain Vanton, studding-sails set, went careering on his way. It was some time later when he showed up at the bare little room which was Richard Hand’s place of business and (except for Judge Hollaby’s office) the Blue Port Bivalve Company’s headquarters.

Captain Vanton was under all plain sail to royals. He was making ten knots or better when he entered the shabby room. He towered over the puny form of Richard Hand as might a great clipper, crowding her white canvas, tower above a fishing smack under her bows. And for a moment he appeared quite likely to run down the village miser. Richard Hand could feel himself cut in half and his wits drowning. He came to his senses with an effort. After all, it was merely the sea captain’s physical presence, aided by those expansive whiskers. Stage stuff! With an inward sneer Mr. Hand got hold of himself. He had always despised whiskers and was clean shaven because he had never been able to grow a beard. A beard would have covered that nasty chin and those cruelly tight lips, and would have softened the look in those eyes. With the benevolent aid of a beard Richard might have been a deacon, as his father had been before him; and he knew it. In a business way, it would have been an advantage to him, now and then, to have been Deacon Hand. Though it gave him the greatest possible satisfaction to collect interest six days a week there was something painful about the fact that none could be collected Sundays. Deacon Hand, passing the plate, would have felt a vicarious joy. The seventh day would not have been entirely wasted.

Rising hastily, the thwarted deacon managed a familiar but far from warming smile. “This is—er—Captain Vanton?” he asked, in a suave tone very few persons in Blue Port had ever heard.

The visitor did not say whether it was or was not. He looked around, as he might have on coming on deck, to see whether the mate was doing his work properly. Richard Hand lugged a chair forward, but Captain Vanton gave no sign that he noticed this. He spoke a few words in his best quarterdeck voice:

“When did you last hear from Captain King?”

The effect on Richard Hand was curious. For a moment his weak and vicious jaw dropped. A look of immense distrust invaded his crafty eyes. Then he seemed to recover himself. Rubbing his hands, as if they were cold, as they doubtless were, Mr. Hand eyed his questioner up and down a moment and then gave question for question:

“Have you a letter from him?”

Captain Vanton, who had not hitherto looked at the village miser at all, now turned and gazed squarely at him, and with so cold and glittering and truculent an eye that Mr. Hand seemed to become more shrunken than ever.

“No,” Captain Vanton told him. Then he asked, “Have you?”

The village miser shuffled and cleared his throat. He mumbled something, a negative apparently. There was a moment’s silence which was broken by the Captain, whose tone had a chilled steel edge.

“Why don’t you answer my question, sir?”

It was not the polite “sir” of the land but the formal, and often positively insulting, “sir” of the sea. Mr. Hand had never been so set down in his life. There was never much starch in him, and what there was went out completely.

“I—I heard from him—why, quite recently, less than a month ago, in fact,” he explained not very readily. “But you—you have later news of him, I can see that.” The Uriah Heep in the man came to the surface and old Mr. Hand exhibited his favourite brand of cordiality—the oily voice and the skimped smile. “Yes-yes. I hope he is well!”

“He is,” affirmed Captain Vanton and added non-committally: “He is dead.”

An expression of shocked surprise appeared on the face of the village miser. He made curious, clucking noises.“Dear me. Dear me,” he managed to say, finally, as an inadequate expression of his regret that Captain King was well—and dead.

Captain Vanton glared at the opposite wall, resolutely taking no notice of this contemptible land creature.

“How did he die?” pursued the much-affected Hand.

“Violently,” barked Captain Vanton. The mortgage miser recoiled. When he spoke again his voice was feeble:

“I suppose you knew him very well?”

The Captain paid no attention to this. Suddenly he turned and looked through Mr. Hand about two inches to the left of the breastbone and in the latitude of the third rib, where Mr. Hand’s heart should have been sighted by the experienced mariner, if the miser had had any. Mr. Hand could not have been more disconcerted if Captain Vanton had pulled a sextant from his pocket and taken an observation with that.

“Why do you lie to me?” asked Captain Vanton at length, and the tone which had made men perspire off Cape Horn induced a cold kind of sweat on the body of Hand, the miser. It really was the tone more than the words, and surely the words were unpleasant enough.

“I don’t know what you mean. I lie to you?” the land crab got out.

“Certainly. Why, damn your eyes, you know you haven’t heard from Captain King in a month, nor six months, not a year!”Mr. Hand stuttered in a process of recollection. Captain Vanton muttered something about “chronometer error” and seemed to swell up with a slow inflation of wrath. He might have expanded with this until the pinprick of the miser’s speech punctured the envelope of his maritime self-command, but, as if some thought arrested him, he stood still, and regarded Mr. Hand attentively for the first time. Captain Vanton’s regard was neither favourable nor unfavourable, and it took no account of what Mr. Hand seemed to be trying to say. “A month?” Of course he had been mistaken. It must have been longer than that; much longer, come to think it over. Several months and by gracious! it might be a full year. Time slips by so fast, and he was a busy man with the affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company on his hands as well as personal business. Investments. Couldn’t be neglected. Must be watched night and day....

Mr. Hand trailed off easily into an account of the operations of the Blue Port Bivalve Company. He painted its bivalvular prospects. Aided by his descriptive faculty Blue Port ceased to be Blue Port and became another Golden Gate.

At the name of that entrance—and exit—to and from El Dorado Captain Vanton’s large bulk quivered slightly about the back and shoulders.

With fixed eyes he listened to all that Mr. Hand poured forth, saying nothing, storing in his brain, perhaps, some of these wonderful adjectives. Along with the adjectives Mr. Hand delivered a well-assorted general lading of information, in fragments and pieces which Captain Vanton seemed to be carefully ticketing for ready reassembling on some distant pier.

At length Mr. Hand’s discourse dwindled. Would Captain Vanton care to invest in the Blue Port Bivalve Company’s shares? More capital was needed and substantial men, men of affairs. But the man of affairs, after drinking in all that Mr. Hand had to say, shut up as tightly as one of Mr. Hand’s own bivalves. He had nothing to say and said it. Mr. Hand, concealing his disappointment, expressed the hope that Captain Vanton would consider. The Captain, who perhaps thought no answer necessary in view of his very obvious consideration of something, turned to go. And then it was that the same stray thought that had struck Keturah Smiley struck Richard Hand. How did he know of Captain King’s death?

Captain Vanton explained in not more than three words. They were, in fact, the same three words with which he had answered Miss Smiley.

Richard Hand was left all of a tremble. “Killed him myself!” A self-confessed murderer! Good God, what was the world coming to that such men stalked about in it!

IX

Tommy Lupton had made up his mind to knock the block off Guy Vanton, and no suitable pretext or occasion offering, he went around to the Vanton house one day and rather awkwardly invited the objectionable Guy to take a walk with him.

Guy Vanton, with a flicker of surprise which changed quickly into a look of pleasure, accepted the invitation. The two boys started north toward the woods encircling a small pond. They said little to each other at first. Tommy was concerned only to reach a small clearing in the woods, a place carpeted with pine needles and reasonably secure from intrusion by passersby. Guy was puzzled by Mr. Lupton’s stride and a feeling that this was somehow less a pleasure stroll than an errand.

“You’re almost through High School, aren’t you?” asked Mr. Vanton.

“Year more,” returned Tommy, going rapidly ahead on the wood path.

“Shall you go to college after that?”

“Cornell,” Tommy informed him.

“For the engineering course?” guessed Guy amicably.

“For the crew,” corrected Tommy.

“I’ve never rowed,” Guy commented, finding it difficult to make conversation at the pace they were travelling. “Except a little, on the Seine near Paris, just for sport.”

“Bragging of where he’s been,” thought the grim young man beside Mr. Vanton. “I’ll give him something to brag about!” Aloud he said: “Ever box?”

“No. I’ve had fencing lessons. I used to wrestle a little. Nothing else much.”

They had gained the clearing. Tommy moved to the centre of it and then turned and faced his companion.

“I’ve brought you up here to tell you something,” he began, white-faced and with blazing eyes. “You—you’ve got to have nothing to do with—with her—with Mermaid,” Tommy found it distasteful to name the woman in the case, “from now on or I’ll knock your block off. I think I’ll just do it, anyway,” shouted Tommy, his fury, the accumulation of weeks of suffering, breaking forth. “You don’t box, but you say you can wrestle. I’m going to hit you and you can clinch and we’ll see who comes out on top! Being a—a damn foreigner I suppose you won’t fight fair, but if you try biting or gouging I’ll get you, don’t you forget it!”

Guy Vanton, open-mouthed with surprise at the first few words, had reddened with anger. His curious, wild-animal eyes, ordinarily so shy, had lost their light and were fixed steadily but unseeingly on the boiling young man confronting him. The colour left his face. He lowered his eyes, stepped back several paces, muttered, “En garde,” and awaited Tommy’s onset.With a desperate sort of roar Tommy charged. His blood was up, his head was down. His fist shot out but only grazed Guy’s cheek. At the same instant his head struck his antagonist’s collarbone, he felt himself caught under the shoulders, and before he could steady himself he was on his back on the ground. Young Mr. Vanton made no effort to keep him pinned there. Tommy rose and attacked again.

This time he flung himself on the other boy, head up and ready to clinch. But he clutched the air. Something slipped under his arm and caught his leg, throwing him from his balance. As he staggered he was picked up and thrown bodily a few feet through the air, landing on his shoulder.

A sense of awful lameness came over Tommy as he picked himself up. Unsteadily he planted a fist where his opponent’s breathing apparatus should have been, but wasn’t. He felt his head caught in a vise and shoved downward with such violence as to make it seem likely it had been permanently detached from his body. Shoulders fitted themselves into the extended curve of Tommy’s right arm; he half spun about like a tee-totum, and then, having four legs instead of the usual two, at right angles to each other, Tommy was uncertain which way he faced. All four legs gave way under him, his face brushed the pine needles, he turned a low somersault and found himself lying on the soft and scented earth, looking with a blurred vision at the tops of the pine trees and a patch of blue sky. They faded from sight after a second. Tommy was senseless.

Water trickling down his face awakened him, water brought by his late antagonist. Young Mr. Vanton’s black hair was in disarray, his normally white face looked whiter than ever, and his strange eyes were filled with anxiety.

“Tommy!”

Closing his eyes for a moment to consider whether this referred to the late Tommy Lupton or to himself, the young man with the wetted face decided that he would take the chance that it was intended for him. He opened his eyes again, sat up with a painful effort, looked at Guy Vanton, and smiled—a sad, calm smile such as befitted the victim of a mistake. But Guy Vanton seemed to think he had made no mistake. He flung himself on the ground beside the warrior and put his arm about the warrior’s shoulders. The shoulders gave a sharp twinge, but the warrior, with an effort, reached up his arm and crooked it reciprocally about the shoulders of the black-haired boy. So intertwined they sat side by side on the pine needles for a moment, and then Tommy struggled to his feet, the arm of the other helping him. After a moment of dizziness Tommy disengaged himself and held out his hand.

“Shake!”

They shook. Young Mr. Vanton exhibited no air of triumph. Instead, he seemed actually dejected. The two, as by common consent, took the homeward path. Tommy burst out: “You licked me fair and square. I—I’d like to be friends. I—I guess you’re all right. Mermaid——”

Tommy stopped. For the first time it struck full upon him that though he had done all that lay in him to settle matters and settle them right, matters, at any rate the all-important matter, remained much as they were before.

Mr. Vanton broke in: “I want to be friends, too. We ought to be, hadn’t we, after this?”

A point bothered Mr. Lupton. “You haven’t made me take back what I said about you.”

Looking down at the ground Mr. Vanton flushed and said: “Oh, well, you didn’t mean it. It—it’s not important I’m not a foreigner, you know. I was born in San Francisco. I keep dropping into French. You just poke me when I do it. And about—her——” Mr. Vanton broke off, seeming to find the exact words difficult. Then he went on: “You see, it isn’t anything. She likes to hear me talk about France and San Francisco and she’s learning a little French. And—there’s nothing to it, except that I don’t know any one here and she’s company.”

A doubt deep in Mr. Lupton found expression. “I s’pose she won’t want anything to do with me after this.”

“I won’t tell her,” asserted the other boy. He hesitated, then said: “Tommy, you know she thinks an awful lot of you. And, anyway, she’s got to decide for herself.”

To this mature and final view old, young Mr. Lupton assented. “Of course! I guess it’s not how we feel about her, but how she feels. Well, I don’t care if I do,” concluded Mr. Lupton, recklessly, taking one of Mr. Vanton’s cigarettes. He lit it, finding the flavour much unlike a pipe of cornsilk. It was not his, however, to pronounce the taste inferior in the face of the world’s judgment. Tommy puffed and felt a strange sense of elevation. “That was a dandy fight you put up,” he conceded. “Say, where did you get all that stuff? Will you show me how?” Mr. Vanton agreed. “I’ve forgotten a lot,” he confessed. “I used to have a Japanese wrestler when I was a kid in San Francisco, and later I had some lessons in Paris.” Mr. Lupton had ceased to listen, however. The curing of Turkish tobacco was suddenly distasteful to him. After a while he apologized: “You pretty well knocked me out,” and managed an admirable smile. They walked back to Blue Port together and Tommy did not even wince at an allusion by the shy-eyed Mr. Vanton to the fact that Mr. Vanton had a longing to become a writer some day. “I scribble a lot now. I even write verse,” explained Mr. Vanton, his innocent brown eyes glancing for a moment into Tommy’s more worldly blue ones. Tommy did not smile or shout. His allegiance to the new friendship was complete and unequivocal; and besides, there was coming into his mind a recognition of certain impalpable things which a girl always fell for and which he, Tommy Lupton, had not to offer. Travel, a foreign language, manners that were polite without being stuck-up, an ability to talk, and a gift of expression; a sort of good looks, too, in spite of the snub nose and the pallor; sophistication extending to the consumption of Turkish cigarettes; and a knack of writing poetry. Tommy, who ached not a little, felt a spiritual depression. What had he to offer Mermaid in comparison with these endowments? He had a good spirit, however; he was a sport and quite ready to exclaim, “May the best man win!” And Guy had won in a fair fight, and he and Guy were friends.

A feeling that school was intolerable crept over young Mr. Lupton. He longed to be with his father at the Coast Guard Station on the beach where, in the fortunate event of a shipwreck, he might alone and single-handed save life.

None of these thoughts seemed to fill the mind of Guy Vanton, who was talking desultorily about San Francisco and Telegraph Hill and the Presidio and the Mission; Paris, boating on the Seine, and streets with meaningless French names. The two boys parted in front of the Vanton house, guarded by tall evergreens, a ship stranded in a forest of Christmas trees. To and fro on the veranda, walking with short steps and heavy tread, paced Captain Vanton, a mysterious Santa Claus wearing enormous sidewhiskers.

X

The way in which Richard Hand senior came to go to Keturah Smiley for money was this: The affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, though generally prosperous, required, at certain seasons, ready money. And despite his $20,000, now considerably grown, Richard Hand could not always put his fingers on it. He had little use for banks. He paid doctor’s bills for babies at about eight per cent., equipped young married couples at as high as sixteen per cent.—for had they not the rest of their lives to pay it off in?—and buried people at an average rate of twelve per cent. This was good business.

He had got all Blue Port under his thumb except Keturah Smiley. It irked him to see walking along Main Street the tall, stiff figure of the only woman who had ever turned him down on a business proposition. He would go over, speculatively, the character, disposition, and probable fortune of his lost sister-in-law.

She owned a good deal of land. Richard Hand did not love land, but this was good land, in one large tract, reaching from the South Country Road to the bay. The larger part was high ground, partly wooded. Through the centre of it flowed Hawkins Creek. Summer cottages, the creek being dredged as a boat basin, or, with a spur of track, a factory site?

When he saw Keturah Smiley he explained, with a good deal of tiresome detail, the affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company.

“I won’t put a cent in it,” Keturah told him.

“I don’t ask you to. I don’t ask you to,” Mr. Hand explained, soothingly. “I know how women feel about such things. ’Tirely right, too, ’tirely right. But it’s a good company and in good shape. Only we need money in hand to lease more oyster beds to p’vide for expanding business. Just $5,000 would set us right.”

“Five thousand shucks! I wouldn’t trust you with five cents!”

“Well, maybe you’d trust Horace Hollaby. I’ll pledge the leases with him as security.”

Keturah thought it over. There could be no question of Judge Hollaby’s honesty. A $5,000 mortgage coming due in six months was certain to be paid. Meantime, the bank would let her have the money. There would be no profit in it, of course, but curiously enough, for once she was not thinking of that. She was thinking of an interview many years ago, and of how she would love to hurt this man.

A desire to pay him off surprised and dominated her. She did not see in the least how it was to be done, but if it was to be done this entrance into business relations with him was necessary and would constitute, in some way not now clear, the first step.

“You take the leases up to Judge Hollaby. I’ll go over them with him, and if they’re all right you go to him and get the money,” she directed.

And then she thought—hard.

XI

Keturah Smiley was no fool. When the leases of the oyster beds were made out they were made out in her name, and the Blue Port Bivalve Company had exactly nothing to do with the transaction. Judge Hollaby, purely in his capacity as Miss Smiley’s lawyer, attended to the matter. Purely as Miss Smiley’s lawyer he attended to the details of a loan of $5,000 by Miss Smiley to Richard Hand. Solely as a man, an oldish fellow who had seen a good deal of human nature and knew both parties in the case, he wondered what would happen next.

He had not long to wait. The oyster beds were not extensive, but they were the richest in that part of the Great South Bay. Keturah Smiley, deserting Judge Hollaby for the first time in her life, went to a Patchogue lawyer and formed with him the Luscious Oyster Corporation.

The Luscious Oyster Corporation took over the leases of the oyster beds held by Keturah Smiley and took an option on a large part of the Smiley land. The Patchogue lawyer held that indiscretion was sometimes the better part of valour. He was very, very indiscreet; he was deliberately and extensively indiscreet. And the world that cared about Blue Port oysters soon knew all the plans and purposes of the Luscious Oyster Corporation.

It would build a large factory on Hawkins Creek. Arrangements for special railway trackage were being made. There was plenty of capital back of the new corporation. It had the rights to a new and hitherto unannounced process for making several first-class products from oyster shells. Its oysters, the best, the fattest, the most succulent in all the Great South Bay, would be shipped, opened, in sanitary containers with a distinctive label and carried in refrigerator cars. The shells would be turned over to the factory where, aside from certain novelties and trinkets and toys, vast numbers of them would be used in the composition of a new kind of cement for floors in office buildings and for roofing.

This cement was superior to anything yet discovered for these two purposes, and possibly for others—experimentation with it was still going on. As a roofing it was clean, smooth, of an attractive dull white finish which could be tinted to any desired shade. It was absolutely tight and waterproof and noiseless! The hardest shower, striking upon it, was inaudible. As a flooring the cement had all these advantages and several others besides. It could be flushed with water, and if wiped only partly dry would dry quickly by atmospheric absorption. Footsteps could hardly be heard upon it. If left white it reflected artificial light and enhanced the illumination of the room; moreover, it was, because of its whiteness, next to impossible to lose anything upon it. Tinted, it matched any rug or floor covering. And it was tremendously durable. Prolonged tests with hard substances scuffing continuously over a sample of the cement had not worn away the surface perceptibly, but should it wear away, the texture of the cement was uniform throughout. The worn spot would look exactly like the rest of the floor.

No stock was for sale.

This last announcement filled with incredulity the dismayed Richard Hand, reading the newspapers and gnashing his teeth which were not so well preserved as Keturah Smiley’s. There must be stock for sale! There always was, in a thing like this. What was the use of all this puffing if it was not to unload stock on unsuspecting purchasers? Still, this piece of canniness did not help Mr. Hand along mentally. He didn’t want the worthless stock. He wanted those oyster beds; and most particularly he wanted this talk about the Luscious Oyster Corporation, its plans, its purposes, its enterprise, and its prospective glory stopped—absolutely stopped. It was hurting the business of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, and if unchecked would hurt it still more.He went to see Keturah.

“Unfair?” snapped Miss Smiley, answering Mr. Hand’s principal accusation. “When did you ever take up the little problems of fairness, Dick Hand? Besides, I have nothing to do with it. I am not the Luscious Oyster Corporation, and sha’n’t be. I’ve merely sub-leased some oyster beds to them and given them an option on a piece of land. Go see Mr. Brown. He’s doing the talking.”

She went to the door with him. “Mind you’re ready with that money when it’s due,” she admonished him.

Mr. Hand was ready neither with money not a retort. He repaired to the office of Mr. Brown, the Patchogue lawyer.

“Absolutely true, every word of it, Mr. Hand,” said Lucius Brown, bringing his right fist against the palm of his left hand. “Ab-so-lute-ly true! No stock for sale. Patents all right. Samples over there on the desk. Tests whenever you’d like to see them.”

“I don’t care for your samples and tests,” snarled old Mr. Hand, showing how bad his teeth were. “What do you want to quit this nonsense?”

“What do you mean?” inquired the younger man, suddenly grave.

“How much money?” shouted Richard Hand, his fingers closing and unclosing. He trembled with rage. The face of the other man suddenly assumed a dark and menacing expression.

“Is this a bribe, Mr. Hand?”

“Call it what you like. I want you should shet up,” answered the caller, doggedly. “Only question is, how much will you take to shet up this fool’s talk?”

Mr. Brown’s face mirrored mixed emotions.

“You’re making a serious mistake, Mr. Hand, when you address me that way,” he informed the miser. “You are badly advised when you talk about paying me money to ‘shet up.’ If you want to make a business proposition to buy the leases of oyster beds held by the Luscious Oyster Corporation and our option on Miss Smiley’s land, I am here to receive it.”

Richard Hand reflected. His crafty glance travelled out of the window and across the street. As if she were there precisely to focus his thoughts at this moment, Keturah Smiley, with Mermaid beside her, walked along the opposite side of the thoroughfare bent on some enterprise of shopping. She was very straight, as usual; her shoulders, thrown squarely back, were inexpressibly odious in the sight of the drooping Mr. Hand. Even more odious was the relaxation of her severe face as she turned to answer some question the girl beside her had been asking. Mr. Hand made up his mind quickly.

“I don’t want none o’ your patents nor samples nor stock,” he declared in a surly and savage tone. “I’ll buy those leases of you for just what they cost me—$5,000.” A thought stunned him. Then he raised his voice almost to a scream.

“Here,” he cried, “what am I buying back my own property for? Them leases is mine. It’s a swindle!”

Mr. Brown seemed interested. A thin foam appeared on Richard Hand’s lips.

“I borrowed $5,000 from Keturah Smiley to lease those beds,” he shouted. “That fool Hollaby makes out the leases in her name. Makes out a note for ninety days for $5,000, my note, and gives it t’ her. Hands me the money and I pay for the leases. I—why, I own those leases. Give ’em back, you robber, give ’em back!”

“Moderate your language or I’ll throw you out of here and down the stairs,” Lucius Brown advised the old man. “Don’t talk robbery or swindling in this office. Now see here, let’s see just what this is. You borrowed $5,000 of Miss Smiley to lease these beds. But the leases were made out in her name. Well, then, man, everything depends upon your understanding with Keturah Smiley. Can’t you see that there are two separate transactions? Can’t you see that it was no concern of hers what you did with $5,000 she lent you? The owners of those beds got their money. And you got $5,000 on your personal note. Did Judge Hollaby conceal from you the fact that the leases were being made out to Miss Smiley?”“No,” groaned Richard Hand.

“Then there’s nothing more to say,” finished the lawyer. “You put yourself in her hands. Has she broken faith? Did she ever promise you in word or writing any money or other valuable consideration for those leases? No? Was there any verbal understanding with you respecting them?”

“I told her I’d pledge ’em with Judge Hollaby, but when they were drawn she insisted they be made out to her,” Mr. Hand explained. He was dazed. “She threatened to back out at the last moment. She—she didn’t exactly promise anything. She said they must be leased to her. She said she’d lend me $5,000 on my note of hand.”

“As nearly as I can make out,” observed Lucius Brown, “Miss Smiley talked little and made no engagements. You can’t prove anything by what she said, and you can’t prove anything by what she thought. You might succeed in proving your own lack of brains; in fact, you have satisfied me that you haven’t any.”

Mr. Hand said no more. With a look of actual agony on his face he turned and drooped away in the direction of the door. But with the tenacity of a drowning man—drowning in grief, rage, mortification, and dismay—he clutched at a straw. Pausing at the doorway of the lawyer’s office he took a half step back.

“But—now—there’s that option on the Smiley tract,” he stammered. “I might buy that. I’ve been thinking for a long time of buying a likely piece of land. How long’s that option for, and how much would you want for it?”

Mr. Brown considered. “Twenty thousand dollars,” he said, finally. Mr. Hand, recoiling, sneered.

“Twenty thousand! Nonsense! Why, the land itself ain’t worth more’n ten. I’d be buying it twice over.”

“Well, it seems to be a passion with you to buy things twice over,” said the lawyer, reflectively. “It’s an option to buy only, and must be exercised in six months, otherwise it is forfeit. But you must consider that in buying this option you practically do away with the Luscious Oyster Corporation. All our plans are predicated upon dredging Blue Port oysters from a few beds and preparing and shipping them from this nearest available site, working up the shells for commercial purposes. If you buy our option we cannot go on. There is no other site, and there are no other beds except the free beds, unsuitably located for our purpose and yielding inferior oysters. You might as well buy our capital stock, patent rights, and everything, lock, stock, and barrel, as buy that option. Naturally we have to ask a high price for it, even if we only paid $1,000 to get it.”

“You figure your assets, outside the option, at $19,000,” deduced Richard Hand. “Option, $1,000; leases of beds, $5,000; patents and prospects and lawyer’s fees”—here he sneered—“$14,000. I’m to pay you $20,000 and then pay Keturah Smiley $5,000 more for part of that $20,000 worth.”

“See here, Mr. Hand,” said the lawyer, earnestly. He changed his tone to one of warning persuasion. “I have no doubt that when the time comes Miss Smiley will refuse to take any money on that note for $5,000, preferring to keep the lease of the oyster beds. Mr. Hand,” and Lucius Brown’s voice had a ring in it, “this is a dead serious proposition. The Luscious Oyster Corporation, which honours me by misspelling my first name, is no joke. Everything that I have said about it can be substantiated and will be. Every prediction I have made will be verified. What that will mean to the Blue Port Bivalve Company and to you personally I can’t say, because I don’t know and I don’t care. But this much I do know: if you buy anything from us you will not pay too high a price for it, and you will pay for it only once. What you don’t buy you will go without. We purpose to go ahead with our plans and do not expect to be molested; but if you are looking for a fight you can get it right here.”

Richard Hand was facing a man younger than himself, of greater intelligence and better education, a man trained in the law who presumably knew exactly what he could do, and when and how—and how much. There was no knowing what was behind him. It might be one of the banks, Richard Hand reflected. It might be (a shudder) rich New Yorkers; capitalists that you read about. The young man named no names, but this only enhanced the dread stirring in Richard Hand’s mind. The unknown is fearful.

If the Luscious Oyster Corporation once got started it very likely spelled the ruin of the Blue Port Bivalve Company. It would break the monopoly he had so carefully and laboriously built up, take away from him the little czardom he had created, and leave him a poor man.

But $20,000! He was worth, now, more than that. Not so much more, though. It would take away from him exactly the sum with which he had started operations in Blue Port; it would put him back where he had been then. He would have enough left to keep him out of the poorhouse.... Either that or a life—and—death grapple, with the loss of every cent he had!

There was a sort of mist before his eyes as he stood in Lucius Brown’s office. He had never been so terrified in his life. A pain that had arisen in the back of his head troubled him. He seemed to be on fire, all aching; and the next moment he was cold, his head swam, and he felt near to nausea. Gradually every other feeling but the one of fear left him—fear and physical pain. His mind, as distinguished from the head that contained it, was numb. He could not think. He heard himself saying:

“I’ll buy. I’ll buy. I’ll buy—everything. Only I must have my note back. Keturah Smiley must give me my note back.” He began to whimper like a little child. “My note, give me back my note! It’s $5,000. Five—thousand—dollars.”

Lucius Brown turned away in a sort of pity, which was for the man’s physical distress only.

“Come in to-morrow and I will have things ready for you,” he said, sitting down at his desk and leaving his caller to get out as well as he might.

And so it came about that Richard Hand, as president of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, signed a contract whereby the Blue Port Bivalve Company bought the capital stock of the Luscious Oyster Corporation, with all rights, leases, options, patents, etc., etc., held by the said corporation; in consideration whereof the company aforesaid agreed to pay and deliver to the said corporation the sum of $20,000—of which $1,000 was payable in cash on the signing of the contract, and the remaining $19,000 was payable in instalments as thereinafter set forth.

With a copy of this agreement, Lucius Brown handed to Richard Hand the note for $5,000. In the street Richard Hand suddenly stopped, pulled this note from his pocket, and with frenzied fingers tore it to shreds.

“Damn you!” he sobbed.

XII

The relation of Keturah Smiley to the events in Lucius Brown’s office was fairly simple; at least, she and Mr. Brown seemed to find it so. They met later in the day. Miss Smiley was unaccompanied.

“Now about this money,” she said, in her most decided tones. “Most of it must go to Hosea Hand. It will be the sum Dick Hand withheld from him, with interest at 6 per cent. for more’n a quarter of a century. If Hosea knows where it came from he won’t take it,” she told Mr. Brown with a grin. “Fix it up. Left him by a cousin several thousand dollars removed.

“I’ll take the $1,000 for the option on my land and run the risk Dick Hand’ll exercise it. He hasn’t enough money left for that. How much do you want?”

Mr. Brown, without affecting embarrassment, named a fee.

“Too little,” Keturah commented. “I have, besides the money for the option, $5,000 for the leases, the money I lent that old fox. That’s $6,000. I figure it’ll take $12,000 to set Hosea right. That leaves $2,000. Take it. You deserve all of it. I’m not saying you don’t deserve more. It’s worth that to me to take the hair and some of the hide off that man.”

“About the patents, Miss Smiley?” Lucius Brown suggested.

“I’m not forgetting them,” answered Keturah. “But they didn’t cost me anything and I don’t want anything for them. I once fed and housed a crazy inventor—that is, he was crazy some ways but his inventions seem to be all right. He left ’em to me for his keep and out of gratitude, maybe. Anyway, I’ve had ’em, along with other odds and ends, these many years. I saw enough to convince me that they were worth something; so did you. Just how much I don’t know; I was never one to monkey with those things. But it won’t hurt Richard Hand to part with a few thousands for them. They’re all in good shape and order. If he goes ahead and makes a mint o’ money with them I’ll be sorry!”

“He hasn’t the necessary capital,” said Brown.

“And he can’t get it,” finished Miss Smiley. “And he has no more nerve than a hen crossing the road. It takes a young man to do those things. Some day that boy of his might make something out of them—if he’s got any stuff in him besides the Hand meanness!” she concluded, thoughtfully.

“I don’t know why I’m so generous with Dick Hand,” she continued, after a moment. “Twelve thousand dollars of this money represents an accumulated sum unrighteously withheld from his brother. Two thousand dollars represents your fee. That’s fourteen thousand—and for it he is getting patents that may be worth ten times that. But we had to give him something,” she said, half humorously. “I wish I had a little less conscience so’s to use him as he’s used others!”

A knock sounded on the door. Mr. Brown called out, “Come in,” and Mermaid entered. She wore a dark green tailored suit, and her skirts had lengthened. Her abundant coppery red hair had been “put up,” and she looked an astonishingly mature young lady. The three freckles remained in place and the dimples had deepened.

“Aunt Keturah,” she said, using a new form of address, “time to go home! Dickie Hand is outside waiting for me. Have you heard the news? His father told Dickie and his mother that he’d broken a tooth and lost all his money. Must have been his wisdom tooth,” surmised the girl as Miss Smiley rose to go with her.

XIII

When Hosea Hand, otherwise and generally Ho Ha, learned through a visit from Lucius Brown that $12,000 had been left him by a cousin he was astounded, happy, and perplexed. For some time he did nothing but treat his friends and acquaintances. He bought Mermaid countless ice cream sodas and Mr. Brown countless cigars, and various others a considerable number of drinks (always taking a cigar himself). Occasionally he got confused in his happiness, as when he asked Mermaid to have a cigar and Lawyer Brown whether he wanted lemon or orange phosphate. His perplexity arose over the cousin whose beneficiary he had so unexpectedly become. Mr. Brown seemed unable to make this end of the wonder suitably clear.

“A fourth or fifth cousin, Hosea,” said the lawyer, carelessly, over the substitute for the phosphate. “She—he—they—I mean, it—was someone you never knew. She—they—had a lot of money. Remembered all the relatives.”

“Well, father and mother both came of large families,” observed Ho Ha. “I must have had a couple dozen cousins. I can’t remember who was fourth and who was fifth among ’em. I don’t know—would you think I might show my appreciation by putting up a nice tombstone to this cousin?”

“Good Lord, certainly not! I mean—I’m sure there will be a suitable memorial,” replied Mr. Brown, slightly choking over the near-phosphate as his mind imaged a tall shaft in honour of Keturah Smiley.

“What was the name?” asked Ho Ha.

“Ke——” began the lawyer, thoughtlessly, caught himself in time, and changed the syllable to the similitude of a sneeze. “Ke-chew! Ke-chew!” He sneezed again, as though an encore might confer verisimilitude. Ho Ha did not appear to suspect the sneeze.

“I s’pose that cussed brother of mine got a share,” Ho Ha meditated aloud. “The wonder is he didn’t get mine, too.”

Mermaid mixed her drinks recklessly, following a pineapple ice cream soda with a raspberry. It was before the day of the more fanciful concoctions or Mermaid would have had a week of sundaes.

“What are you going to do, Uncle Ho?” she inquired with the interest that, from a young woman, is always so flattering to a man, even an uncle.

“Oh, I guess I’ll build a little shack on the beach and put the rest in the bank,” Ho Ha told her.

“I didn’t mean what are you going to do with the money, but what are you going to do with yourself?”

Hosea twinkled. “P’raps I’ll marry,” he hinted. “Now if I was only a young man——” He looked at her roguishly.

“It’s never too late to marry,” Mermaid said, between spoonfuls. “But if you’re going to marry you won’t want a shack on the beach—or your wife won’t, which amounts to the same thing.”

Ho Ha nodded repeatedly. “I don’t want to marry the first woman that proposes to me,” he announced with his most sagacious air. “I might advertise, eh?”

They strolled down the street together until they reached Keturah Smiley’s. Mermaid commanded her uncle to enter. Keturah was making a batch of cookies in the kitchen.

“Come in, Hosea,” she said, cordially. “Child, if Dickie Hand comes here this evening, do for goodness’ sake make the boy eat yesterday’s crullers so we can have a taste of these cookies ourselves. I declare, Hosea, I don’t know what my own cake tastes like any longer.”

“I do,” said Ho Ha, looking at her attentively.“Have one,” said Keturah, slightly flustered by the look he gave her. Could he have learned anything? Ho Ha fell silent a moment, and then after several mouthfuls said: “You were always a great hand for relationships, Keturah. Can you tell me who this cousin was that’s left me some money?”

Miss Smiley faced away from him and began energetically stowing her batch in a cake box.

“I don’t know, Hosea,” she answered. “I never could keep track of your relations.”

“I don’t believe this cousin was a relation,” said Ha Ha. “I never heard of any relations except poor relations. Most likely this was some conscience-stricken person, repenting of evil gains——”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Miss Smiley with an emphasis and a touch of indignation that seemed unnecessary. “She had as clear a conscience as some others, I guess.”

“Oh, so ’twas a woman?” observed Ho Ha, innocently. “Well, now, that’s funny. I can’t think of any woman——”

“I didn’t say ’twas a woman,” parried Keturah. “She or he or whoever it was probably had more than she—he—knew what to do with. Left to the next of kin. It’s a common thing.”

“Uncommon common,” agreed Ho Ha somewhat paradoxically. “Happens every day. You read about it in the newspapers. I dare say she, he, or it got the idea while lining the pantry shelves with ’em. What’s money for, anyway, Keturah?”

“Money,” interjected Mermaid, “is to make those who haven’t it want it and those who have it want more.”

“Money,” said Miss Smiley, sententiously, “is to hang on to until you know when to let go.”

“Money,” Ho Ha framed his own definition, “is only to make some other things more valuable.”

“You’re right, Uncle Ho,” Mermaid conceded. “If Dickie Hand’s father—your brother—didn’t have as much money as he has, Dickie would be worth almost nothing to me.”

“Child!” Keturah rebuked her.

“Oh, Aunt Keturah, I don’t mean that I value Dickie for his father’s money,” explained Mermaid, impatiently, “but don’t you see if his father were poor Dickie would be so—so unmanageable. I shouldn’t be able to do a thing with him! But his father’s rather rich, even if he did lose a lot of money a while ago, and I can just make Dickie behave himself by telling him that he can’t possibly get any credit for what he makes of himself because there’s all that money to help him. That makes Dickie simply wild, and he says he’ll be somebody in spite of his father and his money. He gets almost desperate—which is quite necessary,” she added, thoughtfully. “The other day he said, ‘Damn my father’s money! I’ll show you it hasn’t anything to do with me!’ Of course I gave him the—the dickens but I couldn’t help being rather pleased.”

Miss Smiley regarded Mermaid with great sternness, but Ho Ha’s shoulders seemed to move queerly. Finally he choked.

“If my cooking chokes you, Hosea, you’d better not eat it,” Keturah said with considerable dignity.

“I beg your pardon, Keturah,” was the humble reply.

Mermaid had been eyeing the two as if a surprising notion had just occurred to her. Now she slipped on a jacket and started to leave the house, “I have to see Dickie,” she explained to Miss Smiley, “and get him mad enough so he’ll study to-night and pass his chemistry examination to-morrow.” She slipped out.

Left alone, the man and the woman said nothing for a while. Miss Smiley found various supper preparations to occupy her. Ho Ha watched her with the air of a person who wanted to say something but found it difficult to choose the right words. At length, “Keturah,” he got out, “do you remember a time when money made trouble between us?”

Miss Smiley did not answer him. She did not look at him.

“Of course you do,” Ho Ha resumed, undisturbed, apparently, by the silence. “Now what I would like to know is whether the thing that made us trouble can’t be made to mend it?”

Still she did not answer nor appear to heed him.“I know very well,” said Ho Ha, as if to the furniture, and nodding at the grandfather’s clock which stood at one end of the large living room, “I know well that my fourth cousin or fifth cousin or whoever it was that left me this money left it to me because it belonged to me. I suspect Cousin What’s-the-Name got the money because it belonged to me, and got it from the person who owed it to me expressly to put in my hands. I’m obliged to Cousin Who’s-This as much for trying to do the right thing as for getting me the money. And I feel, somehow, that Cousin You-Can-Guess-Whom thought less about the money than about something else. A cousinly sort of a cousin, but real cousins don’t act that way. Real cousins let each other fend for themselves. But, anyway, that’s no matter, one way or t’other. The main thing is to set things right. The money was only good to show something else that was worth a good deal more than the money—and that was a good feeling. A—a strong and enduring feeling,” emphasized Ho Ha. “A feeling that’s there’s only one word for, and the word doesn’t express it. Keturah,” he exclaimed, getting up and approaching the woman who kept her back so persistently toward him, “you and I aren’t young any longer. We—we were cheated out of something, or else we cheated ourselves out of something, and it was a good deal. But, Keturah, it isn’t all gone. We didn’t lose everything. We made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but it was only a mistake; it wasn’t an ’ntentional wrong either of us did the other. Keturah, can’t—can’t we just salvage some happiness out of the wreckage?” He was standing close to her now.

Suddenly he put his arm awkwardly and eagerly about her. She had raised her hands to her face, and as she took them away he could see she was crying....

Out of doors, Mermaid, without any definite knowledge of what was going on inside, strained her diplomacy to the utmost to keep young Mr. Hand from entering the yard and passing the living-room windows and even, like as not, entering in quest of food to sustain his strength until supper. Dickie was a tall, thin, light-haired boy with a blond skin of singular freshness and brown eyes of singular alterations. Just now they showed a puzzled impatience with Mermaid’s whims.

“Will you go to the dance with me this evening?” he demanded.

Mermaid shook her head. “I want you to walk up street with me,” she announced.

“But why?” interrogated the young man. “I’ve just come from there, and you say you don’t want anything.”

“I want a serious talk with you,” corrected Mermaid. “How would you prepare H²SO⁴, Dickie?”

“Hang chemistry!” ejaculated Mr. Hand. “Wait a moment till I get a cookie.” He started into the yard. Mermaid made a short dash and checked him.“Nothing but yesterday’s crullers,” she stated.

“Well, a cruller, then,” grumbled Dickie.

Mermaid plucked at his sleeve.

“Dick Hand,” she informed him, “you must not go in that house, now. Aunt Keturah has a—a caller.”

“Huh. I don’t suppose he’ll bite me.”

“Well, I will,” the exasperated young woman retorted. “I’ll not speak to you or go to a party with you, if you don’t come along this minute!” Then a purely feminine inspiration seized her. “Do as you like,” she said, with excellent indifference, “I daresay I can get Guy Vanton or Tommy——”

Leaving the sentence unfinished, she controlled herself with an effort and half turned away. Dickie forgot the need of sustenance. Intolerable feelings prompted the young man to fall in at her side. Together they marched solemnly northward. Said Mr. Hand: “Say, Mermaid, I—it—you——”

“They—we—him. Yes, Dickie?”

“You—don’t you think we might become engaged?”

“Why—I suppose we might, some day, Dickie.”

“To-day. I’m going on eighteen and you’re sixteen. Lots of people are engaged for years—as long as three years. I’d be twenty-one and you nineteen.”

“Yes, Dickie; when you’re twenty-one, I’ll be nineteen.”

“But, Mermaid, don’t you—don’t you care?”“If it would help you pass that chemistry exam, I’d become engaged to you right away, Dickie,” sighed Mermaid. “Of course I care. If you flunk that you can’t enter technical school or anywhere else.”

“Oh, damn the chemistry!” roared Mr. Hand. “Exam, Damn!”

“That’s a short poem; remarkable poem,” Mermaid commented with some coldness. “Full of—full of emotion. Conforms to Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ But you’re not tranquil enough, Dickie. I don’t think I want to be engaged to any one who swears regularly.”

“Beg your pardon, ’m sure,” Mr. Hand mumbled, sulkily. “I won’t say it again. Go on, don’t mind me! Go on, go with Tommy. He’s almost twenty. Or Mister Vanton, who is twenty-two. I’m only about eighteen.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and said loftily: “If you don’t mind.” Lifting his cap, he inclined his head and moved away.

Mermaid looked after him uneasily. Suddenly she called out, “Dickie!”

He returned, but with a certain effect of distant politeness.

“Come over after supper and I’ll quiz you on the chemistry best I can,” she offered.

He relaxed somewhat. “All right,” he agreed, magnanimously. “I’ll walk back with you,” he went on, as if uttering an after-thought.Mermaid acquiesced. As they entered the yard they met Ho Ha coming out of the house. He stopped, looking at them happily and mysteriously, and propounded a riddle to Mermaid.

“If an uncle of yours,” he said, “were to marry your aunt, what relation would that make your uncle’s nephew to your aunt’s niece?”

“Friends once removed,” said Mermaid. “Oh, Uncle Ho, I’m tickled to death!”

XIV

At sixteen Mermaid was not adequately to be described by Longfellow’s lines about the maiden

She was, without doubt, a girl still, despite her height of five feet two inches, despite the coiled beauty of her coppery hair and the wise young glance of her blue eyes. The three freckles about her nose, the dimples when she smiled, the faint colour in her cheeks, and the slender straightness of her body were wholly girlish; so was her general attitude toward older people. It was only when she was with certain boys slightly her seniors that a sort of womanliness seemed her predominant quality. The nature of this grown-up atmosphere varied. With Guy Vanton, who was twenty-two, Mermaid would have appeared to most onlookers to be rather sisterly. With Tommy Lupton, who was twenty, she was simply an attractive young person of the other sex. But in her attitude toward seventeen-to-eighteen-year-old Richard Hand the girl alternated the rÔle of comrade and equal with that of motherly management. These variations were not a matter of ages but of personalities. They were determined by the fact that Guy Vanton, from a lonely boyhood, was developing into a lonely young man; that Tommy Lupton was perfectly normal and a healthy youth who was Mermaid’s senior by an interval which, between a boy and a girl or a man and a woman, is without significance; by the further fact that Dickie Hand needed special treatment and looking after.

For Dickie was a gifted boy who was always on a seesaw. He had his ups and downs of which his grasping old father was but seldom aware, and could have viewed with nothing but contempt. Nor was Dickie likely to get much good of his mother’s philosophy. All her life Mrs. Hand had supposed that everything was for the best; and this opiate of age is no drug to feed to youth. Dickie, whose spirits were either aloft in the air or bumping the ground, could not play seesaw alone. Mermaid recognized as much and seated herself on the other end of the plank. Occasionally Dickie would forget the equilibrium necessary and would make more or less horizontal advances toward her. To restore the balance Mermaid had to meet him halfway, but she seized the first opportunity to remind him that his place was at a distance.

At sixteen Mermaid was halfway through High School at Patchogue. The question of her future remained undecided. Cap’n Smiley, her Dad, and his sister, Keturah, quarrelled mildly about it. The keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station did not like the notion of losing sight of his adopted daughter except for holidays. Keturah thought the girl ought to go away to school.

“Don’t be a fool, John,” she counselled the keeper. “The child will be home two months or more in summer. You won’t be on duty on the beach then, and we can all four—you and she and Hosea and myself—be together. She’s got to have something in her life besides Blue Port, and she’s got to have something in her life besides those three boys. They’re all right as boys go,” she added in qualification, “but I don’t suppose you want her to stay here and spend her life as your daughter and my niece, the Vanton boy’s sister, Tommy Lupton’s sweetheart, and Dickie Hand’s mother!”

“Seems to me, Keturah,” interjected her new husband, Ho Ha, “being all those things would be considerable.”

“It isn’t anything to be somebody,” his wife answered. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of tomfoolery in the talk of ‘doing’ this and that. There’s no sense in doing anything unless it’s going to enable you to be somebody, and there’s no sense in being somebody unless it enables you to do something.”

“Hold on, hold on,” protested Ho Ha. “You go too fast for me to follow you. I didn’t marry you for your philosophy.”

“Well, you have to take my philosophy along with the rest,” said Keturah, briskly. “I didn’t marry you to bake pancakes every morning of my life, but I guess I’ll have to.”

“There’s a lot of philosophy in pancakes,” asserted Ho Ha. “They go flip-flop, and that’s the way life goes.”

“That’s why these people who can turn somersaults gracefully always get along well, eh?” said Cap’n Smiley with a grin.

“To stick to the subject and not to the griddle,” resumed Keturah, “the child ought to go away this fall. She likes chemistry and she likes cooking and she mixes all sorts of messes in both. I live in constant dread that she’ll serve me some good-tasting poison by accident or that the baked potatoes will explode. I don’t know anything about this scientific cookery you hear so much about, but Mermaid might as well get what there is in it. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, though I must say that the job of filling his stomach is about all a woman could be expected to handle.” She looked at Ho Ha, a notable eater.

“Well, then, I think she might spend this summer on the beach with me—with all of us,” amended Cap’n Smiley. “I’ll be there anyway this year. You and Hosea and Mermaid can take the Biggles house, or something more sizable if you want; there’s plenty of little houses within a quarter of a mile of the station.”

Mermaid, entering, had heard her Dad’s suggestion and clapped her hands in applause.

“That’ll be splendid!” she cried. “Captain Vanton has taken a little bungalow, and Guy is going to be over there; Tommy Lupton and Dickie Hand are going to spend August camping on the beach; so we’ll have company all summer!”

The three adults exchanged amused glances.

XV

Any girl of sixteen fond of chemistry and cooking can have a first-rate time on the Great South Beach in summer. Any girl of sixteen companioned by from one to three youths slightly older than herself, and of nicely differentiated ages and temperaments, can have a good time in summer anywhere. Mermaid was as happy on the beach as if she had been born there as, indeed, for all practical purposes, she had. She was not “as happy as if she had lived there all her life,” because no one can be happy in a place that has not gained some charm by contrast with other places. The girl collected shells and sea creatures, drifting from chemistry into biology and back again; she analyzed sea weed and admired it; she divided with Keturah Smiley the labour of cooking meals to which the salt air gave inimitable savour; she boated, she swam, waded, tramped the dunes, and sunned herself on the sands. She read everything from the habits of jellyfish to the loves of Maurice Hewlett’s heroes and heroines, moving against mediÆval backgrounds as rich and varied as the scenes in old tapestries. She flirted; and once she found herself in a game of hearts.

Twenty-two-year-old Guy Vanton, rather short, snub-nosed, with black hair and attractive eyes, had gone into the surf with her and, with the ignorance of those unacquainted with that shore, had ventured too far out. The huge curl of a breaker caught him, for a southeast wind was blowing and the ocean was beginning to show whitecaps. Guy was struck on the shoulder by the full force of the falling wave, knocked down, buried, washed about, and dragged out as the tons of water flung upon the sloping sand shingle receded with a baffled roar. Mermaid, higher up on the slope, saw him fall. She breasted the water and, as the bottom sank away from under her feet, struck out, swimming.

Diving head first through the next huge sea she lifted her head and caught sight of Guy struggling a few yards away. She got up to him just as another breaker, a colossal wall of a dark glassiness, towered for a second above them and then toppled down with a noise like Niagara. Mermaid forced herself and Guy beneath the water, which carried them some distance up the beach, and just then he began to clutch her with the grip of one drowning. She broke his hold and, half swimming, tugging with all her might, got him to a place where she could touch bottom. Then she worked forward until she stood, partly supporting him, in a boiling sea waist high. She was nearly exhausted when she finally dragged him up on the beach beyond the wash of the sea. It happened that there was no one near by; evidently they had not been observed from higher up on the shore, so Mermaid began the task of resuscitation. Fortunately Guy Vanton opened his eyes almost immediately under her wearied ministrations.

He did not say anything as he gradually recovered himself. The two sat beside each other on the empty beach. Mermaid, shivering, had thrown sweaters about herself and Guy. At length young Vanton turned and looked in her eyes with the curious, shy, wild-animal look that everyone noticed in his own. At the same time he seized her hand.

“Mermaid, you saved my life—my life.”

He spoke in wonder, as if there were something inexplicable about it. Mermaid smiled at him, white and tired and anxious.“You’re all right, Guy?”

His fingers tightened on her hand. There was something steady in the fire of his look.

“I owe you so much,” he said, brokenly. “Almost everything. You were my first friend. Five years ago. I—I’ve never been able to make it up to you, and now I never shall. I’ve—I’ve loved you all this time. I—won’t you let me kiss you?”

The last words were perhaps laughable, but something that was not a drop of salt water from his black hair rolled down his cheek. Mermaid’s own eyes glistened.

“Of course—this once, Guy,” she murmured. His lips brushed her wet cheek. She rose to her feet a little unsteadily and reaching down her arm half pulled him to his. “They’ll be frightened if we don’t get back soon,” she explained. “You—you mustn’t put your arm about me, Guy. Can you walk all right? See here, I’ll put my arm about you.” She was matter-of-fact. They went unhurriedly along the shore to where a boardwalk at the edge of the dunes led to the house Captain Vanton had rented for the summer. There they parted, with the appearance of unconcern. Keturah Hand met Mermaid at the door of their cottage.

“Child, is it necessary for you to hug that Vanton boy publicly?” she inquired. Mermaid explained.

“How did you bring him to?” asked her aunt.“I kissed him. Now, Aunt Keturah, it’s all right. There was nobody around and he doesn’t know.”

XVI

Tommy Lupton was a great, tall, strapping youth with everything indeterminate about him, from the colour of his hair and eyes to his behaviour. He had no visible ambitions beyond becoming a bayman like his father and ultimately a surfman in one of the Coast Guard Stations on the beach, preferably the one at Lone Cove where John Smiley was keeper and his father a member of the crew. Since the day, some years earlier, when Guy Vanton had thrown Tommy around in a pine-needled clearing in the woods about Blue Port, Tommy and Guy had been good friends, so far as too utterly unlike young men can be fast friends. Neither fully understood the other. Mermaid, who liked them both, had constantly to be explaining Guy to Tommy and interpreting Tommy to Guy.

“Tommy likes you but thinks he ought not to,” she told Guy. “Tommy is the sort of boy that thinks he ought not to like anybody unless he can admire him, too. If Tommy’s best friend were running against—oh, well, say Colonel Roosevelt—for some office, Tommy would vote for Roosevelt. You see, he’d admire Roosevelt.”

“It’s a principle,” elucidated Guy.

“It’s unreasonable,” elucidated Mermaid.“It is better than just voting for a man because he’s a friend of yours.”

“Of course. But to have to admire a person in order to like him comfortably is just like—like a boy!” exclaimed the young lady. “Like a little boy,” she added.

To the hero-worshipping Tommy she had something else to say.

“You’ll never see how much there is in Guy Vanton if you keep looking for what isn’t there,” she admonished him. Tommy looked at her, cloudily.

“I suppose it takes a girl to see what there is in him,” he surmised, jealously. “You—I don’t suppose Guy sees anything in me. I guess you don’t, either. I guess there isn’t anything much in me,” went on poor young Mr. Lupton, pathetically. “I sha’n’t ever amount to a lot. I’ve never been anywhere, and I can’t jabber French, and I never wrote poetry except on a valentine. I hate school and I’m glad I’m through with it. And I’d rather be a Coast Guard than write a book, as Guy’s doing, or become a great chemical engineer, as you say Dickie may some day. I’ll never be rich and I’ll never be famous, and you can’t make me either.”

Mermaid was building things in the sand. She brushed her hands and looked at him with a smile.

“I don’t want to make you anything, Tommy,” she said. “Go on and be a Coast Guard. My Dad’s a Coast Guard. Your father’s a Coast Guard. Being a Coast Guard is just as good as anything else and better than most. It all depends upon the man.”

“Well, I’m a man,” avowed Mr. Lupton. “And, anyway, you say that now, but after you’ve been away at school and all that you’ll look down on me. You won’t want anything to do with me, much. You won’t want me around. And I won’t be around,” he concluded. Mermaid looked at him, briefly, and then glanced away. A slight uneasiness beset her. It was justified when Tommy suddenly reached over for her hand, taking it roughly.

“Mermaid,” he said. He stopped, and then went on, stammering a little: “You—you must know I love you—like everything,” he finished, helplessly. “You—of course I can’t expect you feel the same way——”

Mermaid, much disturbed, cut in: “No, I don’t, Tommy.”

“You oughtn’t to interrupt like that.” Mr. Lupton’s voice was boyishly irritated. “You—you wouldn’t interrupt Guy Vanton! I can’t expect you to listen to me, I suppose. Maybe I haven’t any right to speak.” He was immediately astonishingly grown-up again. “You’ve got to hear me—at least, I hope you’ll hear me,” he went on, imploringly. “I told you you couldn’t make anything of me but you could help me make something of myself.”

A sixteen-year-old girl, listening to such words, can hardly be blamed for a slight sense of self-importance. It is part of a girl’s education, or ought to be. Perhaps not at sixteen; but Mermaid had already experienced the self-importance that comes from handling rather risky material, even though it was only inert powder or colourless acid. This was one of those situations where there is no danger if the substances are not brought near to a spark. She therefore dampened her sympathy before mixing it with Tommy’s unreserve. She felt self-importance, but she did not abate her caution. More than one explosion in the laboratory had taught her humility. It is fair to say that she was not consciously experimenting and she was not heartless when she answered the boy.

“I don’t want to help you make something of yourself, Tommy. I don’t want to make anything of anybody except myself. I’ll have all I can do, maybe, to do that,” she continued. “I—I like you, and that’s all. No, it isn’t; I’ll let you alone. There—that’s a good deal, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be, from a girl.”

Poor Tommy was in no condition to jest. He picked himself up, unhappily, from the sand. For a moment Mermaid’s mind ran back curiously to the story that, as a very little girl, she had heard her Uncle Ho tell of his boyhood. Nightly, through the pane of a little attic window high up in the hills of the middle of Long Island, he had seen the flash of the Fire Island Lighthouse, many miles distant, a beacon inviting the youngster to adventures in the great world whose shores it guarded. Mermaid, who was imaginative, had often re-lived those childish hours in the dark attic invaded by the beckoning ray. As she stood up now, gathering up her sweater and one or two books from the beach, it came home to her that Tommy Lupton, who was twenty, would never undergo such an experience. Poor Tommy was not imaginative; for him no beacon flamed anywhere; his whole idea of life was work well-performed, a wife and children (probably), and a comfortable home to visit in his hours off duty. And once, if fortune brought it about, once in a long lifetime of work and play and peacefulness, an heroic moment, one deed worthy of admiration, a single act of bravery or courage or devotion that would show the stuff that was in him—all the rest would be background. If the moment never came that would not matter. The only thing that mattered was to be ready for it if it should come.

Whereas Mermaid must be forever seeking moments and doing her part, when she was ready, to create them. There was a profound difference. Tommy stood on guard, his back to the rock; she would be advancing—retreating, too, sometimes, no doubt—but constantly gaining ground. There was young Dickie Hand with his unquestionable gifts; he would go forward, and go far if—if—he had the right incentive. And Guy Vanton.... Mermaid paused with a pang. In this process of definition it struck upon her for the first time that Guy would neither go forward like herself or Dickie Hand nor stand steadfast like Tommy; he would shrink back. He would conduct a well-covered withdrawal, a leisurely, unobtrusive withdrawal; and it would be a retreat!

The pang was caused by the knowledge that of the three she most nearly loved Guy.

XVII

The summer spent itself with no further eventfulness except in the matter of ghosts.

Many people, perhaps most, do not believe in ghosts, but Mermaid did and so did her Dad. Uncle Ho was well acquainted with the principal ghosts peopling the beach. Keturah Hand ridiculed the idea of their existence. In general, those who had lived on the beach for any length of time were believers or of open mind; those whose visits to the beach had been confined chiefly to all-day picnics thought the legends nonsense.

“Captain Kidd,” stated Keturah, “may have buried a chest of treasure in the bald-headed dune with the very steep slope. I know my father used to tell of people digging there to recover it. Kidd was certainly round about here in the Quedagh Merchant or the Antonio; and everybody knows that he stopped at Gardiner’s Island and got supplies and presented Mrs. Gardiner with a bolt of—calico, wasn’t it? If he buried a chest in that dune over there, he, or his crew, certainly may have killed a gigantic negro, spilling his blood over the chest so that his wraith would guard the treasure. I think it likely that the crew did it. Seamen are always so superstitious.” Here she looked pointedly at her husband, an ex-sailor. “Hosea here, just because they used to cut a cross in the mast to bring a fair wind, started carving the bedpost the other day so the wind would blow from the southwest instead of the north. Kidd was, or had been, too much of a gentleman to entertain such low ideas; and if his crew killed the negro and spilled his blood I fancy he washed his hands of it.”

“Of the blood?” interpolated Ho Ha, innocently. His wife looked at him sharply and, without answering, went on:

“But when it comes to that negro’s spirit guarding the treasure, and when it comes to dark, swarthy Spanish ghosts with rings in their ears; and drowned sailors in flapping dungaree trousers, and ghosts of old sea captains, lost passengers, and Heaven knows who else, I, for one, don’t take the least stock in them.”

“Don’t you believe in the Duneswoman, Aunt Keturah?” inquired Mermaid.

“No, not in a Dunesman, nor in the Dunes children, unless you mean those eighteen children of old Jacob Biggles that were named after wrecks and ragged as ghosts,” Mrs. Hand retorted.“But, Aunt, I’ve seen the Duneswoman,” protested Mermaid. “So has Dad.”

“All you’ve seen is a face and an arm,” corrected Mrs. Hand. “And I can’t find any one else who has seen as much as that. A face and an arm are not a ghost. They’re a—I don’t know what,” she finished.

“A hallucination,” Mermaid offered.

“A hallelujah. That’s what you say when you see one. You say ‘Hallelujah!’” came from Ho Ha.

“When I see one I may say something even more remarkable,” his wife responded, grimly.

It was several nights later when she awoke and uttered a long-drawn scream of terror.

“Hosea!” she cried, clutching her pillow. “Hosea, there’s someone at the window!”

Ho Ha leaped up manfully, went to the window, stuck his head through the netting which was tacked on as a screen, and drew it in again.

“Nonsense, Keturah,” he said, gently. “No one in sight except Captain Vanton standing on the dune in front of his house.” The Vanton cottage was a dune away, but a valley lay between. “You—why, you must have seen a ghost. Oh, ho-ho-ho!”

He communicated the nature of the disturbance to Mermaid in the next room, and when Cap’n Smiley, who slept at the station, came over for breakfast next morning, there was some chaffing about the ghost Keturah had seen.“I certainly saw something,” said Mrs. Hand, emphatically. “And if it was a ghost it was the ghost of a live man. It had sidewhiskers exactly like Captain Vanton! You all know he prowls around at night. There’s something mighty queer about it; but then, everything about that man is queer. When it comes to his looking in my bedroom window, though, I think I shall do something.”

“Oh, pshaw, Keturah,” said her brother. “Vanton may be a peculiar fellow, but it’s not likely he walks by your windows. At two in the morning, anyway.”

“You seem to think I have nothing he might covet, John, but I have a few trinkets that anybody would set a value to!”

“Is that why you hugged your pillow?” inquired her husband, innocently. Keturah gave a little jump and looked about her nervously, a performance entirely contrary to her nature. As if she realized that she had betrayed herself she said, finally: “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything about it but I did bring my stones over here. I felt it wasn’t safe to leave ’em in Blue Port, and of course I sleep with ’em under my head.”

“Stones?” exclaimed Mermaid in mystification. “You don’t mean jewels, do you, Aunt Keturah?”

“Of course I mean jewels,” replied Mrs. Hand, with some asperity. “I’ve never told you anything about them—young people get their heads turned with such things—but I have every one of the stones that belonged to my aunt, Keturah Hawkins, Captain Hawkins’s wife; and I also have the stones that belong in settings in the curios and things in our parlour. There’s quite a lot of them, and if I weren’t used to a hard pillow I daresay I’d not be able to sleep a wink.”

“Oh, Aunt, may I see them?”

“I suppose you may, though it’s a lot of trouble to get them out. It’s risky, too, for some of the littler ones might roll away and get lost,” commented Mrs. Hand.

After breakfast she brought out her pillow and exposed the contents to the two men and the girl. John Smiley had seen the jewels, though not for many years. Ho Ha knew of their existence, but had never seen them and had supposed them secreted in Blue Port. To Mermaid their very existence was a revelation, and their beauty a greater one.

All kinds of jewels seemed to be represented, and there were also Eastern stones which none of the four could name. Sapphires were especially abundant, very large ones, of darkest blue. They had been Keturah Hawkins’s favourites, but Mermaid worshipped the emeralds which she knew she could have worn in her hair, and the diamonds which would have been no more brilliant than her blue eyes. There were wonderful pearls which needed to be worn to regain their finest lustre, and there were rubies of as dark a hue as the blood that must have been shed for them. The majority of the gems were loose; the pearls were roped, however, and there were a few bracelets and other simple ornaments. All the settings were old and Eastern, suggestive of bare arms and bare necks—bare ankles, too. At least one of the ornaments was an anklet, they conjectured. Where Captain Hawkins had got them Keturah Hand was unable to say. He had, she supposed, picked them up at various times and in many places. He had visited, in his career, every port from Bombay to Tientsin; Ceylon, Madagascar, and South Africa; Peru he had touched at more than once. And he had sometimes done business by barter.

After they had admired the jewels Keturah, with Mermaid’s help, checked them off on a list she had and restored them to their hiding place.

The next night, after they had spent the day on the bay in Cap’n Smiley’s small sailboat, pillow and all were gone.

XVIII

The loss of the jewels affected Keturah Hand strangely. At first it made her ill, but soon she was not only well, but better than she had been for a long time. She declared herself actually relieved, in a sense, to be rid of the stones. They had been a constant worriment for years. Now she did not have the care and anxiety of them—and she knew they were in safe hands.

“Any one who steals them is going to take pretty good care of them,” she declared. “And I think I know who stole them, and why.”

“Was it the ghost of one of Kidd’s pirates?” asked Mermaid, upon whom the theft of the jewels had seemed to have a more persistently depressing effect than it had had upon her aunt.

“He may have been one of Kidd’s pirates in a previous incarnation, and he may have been Kidd himself in an earlier life,” responded Keturah. “At present he’s a retired sea captain whose story wouldn’t look pretty in print, I suspect. Not that it will ever get printed,” she added. “He took them because——” She broke off. “I don’t know as I’m called upon to air my guesses,” she explained. “I’m not a detective in a detective story and I’ll not do any deducing out loud.”

Both Ho Ha and John Smiley were much upset by the disappearance of the stones, though both felt called upon to remonstrate with Keturah when she said, quite calmly, that Captain Vanton had got what he was after.

“If there’s the slightest shred of evidence that Captain Vanton took them, Hosea and I can handle him,” her brother told her. “You won’t let the theft be known, and you won’t hire a detective. You won’t tell us anything that points to Vanton.”

“Because I can’t,” cut in Keturah. “I’m not like a good many women. I don’t mistake my intuitions for evidence. I just feel that he has them—and I don’t much care if he has. I also feel that he won’t break them up and sell them, and that eventually they will get where they belong, as nearly as possible. Jewels aren’t like any other kind of property, and everybody who has much to do with them knows it. I’m not superstitious, but you don’t have to be superstitious to believe that a sort of curse attends the possession of most really valuable gems whenever they’re not in the right hands. They don’t rightly belong to me, never did. As I say, it’s no use to hand down jewels like other property. My aunt, to whom they belonged as rightfully as any one else, had no more sense than to leave them to me along with her land and furniture. I’ve always known they weren’t for me, but what could I do about it? Nothing, except wait for them to get into the right hands or throw them in the bay. Maybe they’ve got into the right hands now. If they haven’t, they’ll make whoever’s got ’em trouble enough until they do. If they belong to him it won’t matter how he came by them, or whether he deserves ’em, or whether he is a good man or a devil; but if they don’t belong in his hands, he may be a living saint and still be sorrier than the worst sinner.”

Ho Ha and Cap’n Smiley affected to treat this argument as foolishness, but something in it appealed to the mysticism in Mermaid. It fitted in with what she had observed of the illogicality of life, and she was readier than many an older person to believe that the world is ruled as much by sentiment as by law, and that life is a series of compromises only for those who can’t accept its contradictions, and go on with their work.

She expressed this view to Guy Vanton without mentioning the loss of the stones.

It was Mermaid’s last day on the beach. In a week she would be in New York, taking special courses at Columbia and perhaps elsewhere. She was going in for cooking and chemistry, the chemistry of foods, and later she might take some medical courses leading to a study of the chemistry of digestion.

“The chemistry of the human body,” she said to Guy, “is a job for the next fifty years.”

Guy considered, lazily. “If you like it, I suppose,” he said, reflectively. “I wish I knew enough chemistry to analyze my father, for instance. Not his digestion, which is perfect, but his mind. But I think the best approach to the mind is still alchemy. The philosopher’s stone probably exists, only we’ve always been on the wrong track in hunting it. It would be an idea that would transmute base-mindedness to rare-mindedness, and not base metals to gold. My father needs that kind of a philosopher’s stone; perhaps I do, too. We’re very unlike, you know; often it seems to me as if he weren’t my father at all. Sometimes I think he hates me, but even if he did—there are ties hate can’t break.” His voice lowered and his queer eyes looked into the distance. “Some day,” he said, “some day, Mermaid, I’ll tell you, maybe—— You pulled me out once, you know.” He looked at her with a painful appeal. His eyes were those of a wild fawn. An almost overpowering desire to answer that appeal swept through the girl, met the solid wall of her final doubt of him, and was broken to pieces. She gave his hand a friendly squeeze. “Good-bye,” she said, and left him.

---