one day while a performance of this sort was going
on, and for fear that he should think it odd Susan explained to him that
it was a habit of hers when things very much worried her and she felt
like being ugly to people. (The trouble that day was that the colored
girl, who had a wonderful faculty for stirring up tribulation, had
broken an India china teacup that had belonged to Susan's grandmother,
and that Susan had thought the world of.) That evening, while we were
sitting on the veranda smoking, and before Susan, who was helping clear
the supper-table, had joined us, Gregory Wilkinson said to me, with
oven, more emphasis than usual, that Susan was the finest woman he had
ever known; and he added that he was very sorry that when he was my ago
he had not met and married just such another.

He and I talked a good deal at odd times about the money that our
great-great-great-uncle the pirate had buried, and that through all
these years had stayed buried so persistently. He did not take much
interest in the matter personally, but for my sake, and still more for
Susan's sake, he was beginning to be quite anxious that the money should
be found. He even suggested that we should take Old Jacob over to the
bay-side and let him try again to find the _Martha Ann's_ anchorage; but
a little talk convinced us that this would be useless. The old man had
been given every opportunity, during the two days that we had cruised
about with him, to refresh his memory; and we both had been the pained
witnesses of the curious psychological fact that the more he refreshed
it, the more utterly unmanageable it had become. The prospect, we
agreed, was a disheartening one, for it was quite evident that for our
purposes Old Jacob was, as it were, but an elderly, broken reed.

About this time I noticed that Gregory Wilkinson was unusually silent,
and seemed to be thinking a great deal about something. At first we
were afraid that he was not quite well, and Susan offered him both her
prepared mustard plasters and her headache powders. But he said that he
was all right, though he was very much obliged to her. Still, he kept
on thinking, and he was so silent and preoccupied that Susan and I
were very uncomfortable. To have him around that way, and to be always
wondering what he could possibly be thinking about, Susan said, made her
feel as though she were trying to eavesdrop when nobody was talking.

One afternoon while we were sitting on the veranda-