acklin to Big Wreck Cove folk. It was no reason he could
give the girl at this time. In some ways the captain of the _Seamew_
was wise enough. He felt that this was no time to put forward his
personal and particular desires. Enough that she had admitted him
to her friendship and had given him her confidence.

She had accepted him in all good faith in a brotherly sense. He
dared not spoil his influence with her by revealing a deeper
interest.

"We may as well look at this thing calmly and sensibly," Tunis said,
answering her statement of what was indubitably a fact. "It is quite
true my old neighbors would not accept you as Sheila Macklin. But
they need you; no other kind of a girl would so suit their need. And
you could not help loving them; nor they you, once they learned to
know you."

"I am sure I should love them," breathed Sheila.

"Then, as you are just the person they want and their home is just
the place you need for shelter, I am going to take you back with
me."

"Oh, Captain Latham! We--we can't do it. My name--somebody will some
time be sure to hear about me, and the dreadful secret will come
out."

"No, it won't," said Tunis doggedly. "There will be no secret, not
such as you mean, to come out."

She gazed upon him in open-eyed surprise, her lips parted, her face
aglow.

"You mean--"

"We'll leave Sheila Macklin sitting on this bench, if you will
agree. She need never be traced from this point. Let her drop out of
the ken of the whole world that knew her. The name can only bring
you harm; it has brought you harm. Through it you are threatened
with trouble, with disaster. Your whole future is menaced through
that name and the stain upon it."

She looked at him still, scarcely breathing. Latham did not realize
the power he held over this girl at the moment. He was to her a
living embodiment of the All Good. Almost any suggestion, no matter
how reckless, he might have made, would have found an echo in her
heart and the will to do it.

To few is vouchsafed that knowledge which makes all clear before the
mental vision. Tunis Latham's perspicacity did not compass this
thing. He did not grasp the psychological moment, as we moderns call
it, and consummate there and then the only reasonable and righteous
plan that it was given him to complete.

The captain of the _Seamew_ was a young man very much in love. He
did not question this fact at all. But in his wildest imaginings he
could never have beli