t body with pink cheeks, kindly eyes, and,
bearing witness to her character, a determined mouth; but now she seemed
to be enveloped by some transforming aura. Her auburn hair, touched with
gray, had blown about her head in an unusual abandon, her cheeks were
flaming, and her eyes had pin-points of light. She set the lamp down on
the table with a steady hand and drew the shades. Then she became aware
that the cap'n was looking at her. He had a fatherly gaze for everybody,
the index of his extreme kindliness, but it had apparently been startled
into some keener interest.

"Well," said Mariana, and found that she was speaking irritably. "What's
the matter? You look as if you never see anybody before."

She and the cap'n had been schoolfellows, though he was older, and often
she treated him with scanty ceremony; now, after she had tossed him that
aged formula of banter, she laughed to soften it. But she was still
unaccountably angry.

"Well," said the cap'n slowly, "I dunno 's I ever did see just such a
kind of a body before."

The words seemed to be echoing from the stolen conversation too warmly
alive in her memory. He, too, she thought, was probably considering her
a nice proper-looking woman, but one no man would think of marrying.

"Take a chair," she said, and the cap'n went over to the hearth where a
careful fire was laid.

"Goin' to touch it off?" he inquired.

Mariana, with a jealous eye, noted that he was looking at the fire, not
at her. She wondered if Lizzie Ann West would say a man had to be warmed
as well as fed.

"Touch it off," she said, with a disproportioned recklessness. "There's
the matches on the mantel-tree."

The cap'n did it, kneeling to adjust the sticks more nicely; and when
one fell forward with the burning of the kindling, lifted it and laid it
back solicitously. Then with a turkey-wing he swept up the hearth, its
specklessness invaded by a rolling bit of coal, put the wing in place,
and stood looking down at what seemed to be his own handiwork.

"There!" said he.

He took the big armchair by the hearth, and Mariana drew her little
rocker to the other corner. She seated herself in it, her hands rather
tensely folded, and the cap'n regarded her mildly.

"Ain't you goin' to sew?" he inquired.

"Why, no," said Mariana, "I dunno 's I be. I dunno 's I feel like
sewin' all the time."

"Well, I dunno 's there's any law to make a woman set an' sew," the
cap'n ruminated. "Sewin' or knitt