Taken aback as he had been by the strange doings of Nat’s schooner, his dismay then was a feeble imitation of the panic that smote him now. It had long been a favorite formula of Bijonah’s that “A schooner’s a gal you can understand. She goes where ye send her, an’ ye know she’ll come back when ye tell her to. She’s a snug, trustin’ kind of critter, an’ she’s man’s best friend because she hain’t got a grain o’ sense. But woman!”

Here Bijonah always ended, his hands, his voice, and his sentence suspended in mid air.

Now he was baffled completely. Here was a girl who was deeply in love, crying. He tiptoed cautiously to the deck again and stole forward to the galley as though he had been detected in a suspicious action.

After a while the storm passed, and Nellie sat up, red-eyed and red-nosed, but with a measure of her usual tranquillity restored.

“Idiot!” she told herself. “To howl like that over him!”

Nellie finally regained her poise of mind and remembered that she had been at the point of writing a letter to her mother (to be mailed by the first vessel bound to a port) when Nat had interrupted her.

The table at which she sat was a rough, square one of oak, with one drawer that extended its whole width. She opened the drawer and found it stuffed with an untidy mass of paper, envelopes, newspapers, clippings, books, ink, and a mucilage-pot that had foundered in the last gale and spread its contents over everything.

Such was her struggle to find two clean sheets of paper and a pen that she finally dumped the contents of the drawer on top of the table and went to the task seriously. The very first thing that came under her hand was a heavy packet.

Turning it face up, she read, with surprise, a large feminine handwriting which said:

Mr. Code Schofield, kindness of Captain B. Tanner
Letter enclosed.

At the right-hand side of the envelope was this:

Nellie Tanner stared at the envelope. It was the handwriting that held her. She had seen it before. She had once been honorary assistant treasurer of the Church of England chapel, and it suddenly came to her that this was the handwriting that had adorned Elsa Mallaby’s checks and subscriptions.

She knew she had solved the problem the instant the answer came. Elsa had been to Boston to school, and the fact was very evident. She sat and stared at the black letters, flexing the packet filled with bills.

“Why should Elsa Mallaby be sending money to Code Schofield?”

Everybody in Freekirk Head knew that Code Schofield went up to Elsa Mallaby’s to dinner occasionally. So did other people in the village, but not so often as he. There had been a little gossip concerning the two of them, but, while Code was an excellent enough fellow, it was hardly probable that a rich widow like Elsa would throw herself away on a poor fisherman. They forgot that she had done so the first time she married, and that she had the sea in her blood.

These shreds of gossip returned to Nellie now with accrued interest, and she began to believe in the theory of fire being behind smoke.

She also remembered the night of the mass-meeting in Odd Fellows Hall when Code had made his 127 suggestion of going to the Banks. There had flashed between Elsa’s velvet-dark eyes and Code’s blue ones a message of intimacy of which the town knew nothing. Every one saw the look, and nearly every one talked about it, but they did not know that only a couple of nights before Elsa had been the one to put Code on guard against his enemies, and that he was more than grateful.

“I’d just like to know what’s in that letter so as to tease him the next time we meet,” she said gaily to herself. She was now out of all mood for writing her letter home, and, stuffing the contents of the drawer back into place, she returned the latter to the table and went on deck.

The sea was running higher. The new topmast was up, and within half an hour the Rosan heeled to the wind and plowed her way northward after the remainder of the fleet.