ld to fish,
had remained at home, and Bill Boughton, who was completing details
for the immediate and profitable sale of the season's catch, was
behind the counter of his general store.

He dealt out supplies to the women and children, and wrote down
against their fathers' shares the amount of credit extended. But
others, day after day, found nothing set against them, and this was
due to the promise of help that Elsa Mallaby kept.

"It's useless to charge supplies to those who have nothing now with
the idea of getting it back from their fishing profits," she said.
"What they earn will just about pay for it, and then there they are
back where they started--with nothing. Better let me pay for
everything until the men get back. Then they will have something
definite ahead to go on."

No one but Adelbert Bysshe, the rector, Bill Boughton, and Elsa
Mallaby herself knew exactly how much she paid out weekly toward the
maintenance of the village. But all knew it to be an enormous sum (as
reckoned on the island), and daily the worship of Hard Luck Jim's
widow grew, until she occupied a place in Freekirk Head parallel to a
patron saint of the Middle Ages.

But Elsa Mallaby was intensely human, and no one knew it better than
herself, as, one late afternoon, she sat at her mahogany table,
looking absently over the stubs in her check-book. She saw that she
had disbursed a great deal of money--more, perhaps, than she would
have under any other circumstances--but she frankly acknowledged that
she did not mind that, if only she achieved the end toward which she
was working.

For Elsa, more than any one on Grande Mignon, was a person of ways and
means.

She was one of those women who seem to find nothing in self-communion.
Hers was a nature destined for light and gaiety and happiness. To sit
in a splendid palace and mope over what had happened was among the
last things she cared to contemplate.

Being of the pure Grande Mignon stock, she looked no farther for a
husband than among the men of Freekirk Head, good, honest, able men,
all of them. And her eye fell with favor upon Captain Code Schofield
of the schooner _Charming Lass_, old schoolfellow, playmate, and
lifelong friend.

The money she had mailed to him had only been an excuse to write a
letter; the favors to Ma Schofield were, in great part, to help
further her plan; the whole business of helping support Freekirk Head
was a flash of dramatic display, calculated to bri