goin' to jump. What is it, Mariana?"

"Cap'n," said Mariana. She was used to calling him by his first name in
their school-day fashion, but her new knowledge of life seemed for the
moment to have made all the world alien to her. "Cap'n, if anybody said
you couldn't do a thing, wouldn't you say to yourself you'd be--wouldn't
you say you'd do it?"

"Why, I dunno," said the cap'n, wondering. "Mebbe I would if 'twas
somethin' I thought best to do."

"No, no. If 'twas somethin'--well, s'pose somebody said you was a
Chinyman, wouldn't you prove you wa'n't?"

"Why," said the cap'n mildly, "anybody'd see I wa'n't, minute they
looked into my face. Nobody'd say anybody was a Chinyman if they
wa'n't."

Mariana was able to laugh a little here, though a tear did run over her
cheek in a hateful, betraying way. She wiped it off, but the cap'n saw
it.

"See here, Mariana," said he stoutly, "who's been rilin' you up?
Somebody has. You tell me, an' I'll kick 'em from here to the state o'
Maine."

"Oh, it's nothin'," said Mariana. "Here, you lay on another stick. I was
only thinkin' when you spoke of Mandy, what a fool she was to tie
herself up to the best man in the world if she could get good wages,
nice easy place same as yours is. Well, there, Eben! I do get kind o'
blue when the winter comes on and I sit here by the fire watchin' my
hair turn gray. If anybody was to offer me a job, I'd take it."

"You would?" said Cap'n Hanscom.

She saw a thought run into his eyes, and hated it. She liked Eben
Hanscom, but all the decorous reserves were at once awake in her,
bidding him remember that she was not going to scale the trim, tight
fence of maidenly tradition. He began rather breathlessly, and she cut
him short.

"I'd come and be your housekeeper," said Mariana, hurriedly in her turn,
"for three dollars a week, same as you give Mandy, and be glad and
thankful. Only I'd want somebody else in the family. I dunno why, but
seems if folks would laugh if you and me settled down there together
like two old folks--"

"I dunno why they'd laugh," said the cap'n stoutly. His eyes were
glowing with the surprise of it and the happy anticipation of Mariana's
tidy ways. "Nobody laughed at me an' Mandy; leastways if they did, I
never got hold on 't."

"Well, you see, Mandy's day begun pretty soon after your wife was taken,
and folks were kinder softened down. Anyways, I couldn't do it. 'Tain't
that I'm young and 'tain't that I'm a fool,