I'd work my fingers to the bone for a home like that, for shelter,
and kindness, and--and--oh, well, some girls have all the best of
it, I guess!"

She sighed. It was half a sob. He saw her hands clasp tightly before
her in the dusk. The gesture was like a prayer. He knew that her
pale face was flushed with earnestness. He cleared his throat.

"You have the chance, if you want it, Miss Macklin," he said.

CHAPTER X

THE PLOT

There was a long minute of utter silence following Tunis Latham's
last words. Then the girl's whisper, tense, yet shaking like a
frightened child's:

"You do not know what you are saying."

"I know exactly what I am saying," he replied.

"They--they would not have me."

"They will welcome you--gladly."

"Never! I am a stranger. They must be told all about me. They could
never welcome Sheila Macklin."

He knew that. He knew it only too well. She was just the sort of
girl to make Cap'n Ira Ball and Prudence happy, to bring to their
latter years the comfort and joy the old couple should have. But the
Puritanism which, after all, ingrained their characters would never
allow the Balls to welcome a girl with the stain Sheila Macklin bore
upon her name. Tunis remembered clearly how scornfully Cap'n Ira
had spoken of the possibility of their taking in a girl from the
poor farm. Pride of family and of name is inbred in their class of
New Englanders.

The old people wanted a girl whom they could love and look upon as
their own. They would welcome nobody else. They had set their minds
and hearts upon Ida May Bostwick. The fact that Ida May failed to
come up to their expectations, that she was perfectly worthless and
inconsequential, did not open the way for another girl to be
substituted for Ida May. Possibly Tunis might be successful in an
attempt to interest the Balls in Sheila Macklin's case. But the girl
did not want charity, not charity as the word is used in its general
and harsher sense.

Should she carry with her wherever she went this name which had been
so smirched--the identity of Sheila Macklin, the ghost of whose past
misfortune might rise to shame her at any time--the girl could never
be happy. Did Tunis Latham succeed in getting the Balls to take
Sheila in and give her a home, this story that so bowed her down
would continually threaten its revelation, like a pirate ship
hovering in the offing!

And there was, too, a deeper reason why he could not introduce
Sheila M