se in her. What right had he to own her, she asked
herself, when it only made other women scornful of her? She lifted her
head and faced him. What he saw in her eyes he could not perhaps have
told, but it suddenly quieted him to a surprised humility.

"You goin' over to keep house for him?" he asked, with a motion of his
head toward the cap'n, who seemed to be petitioning the god of
domesticity lest his new hopes be confounded.

"Yes," said Mariana, "but I ain't goin' unless he can get one or two
more. I'm tired to death of settin' down to the table alone. One more
wouldn't be no better. Three's the kind of a crowd I like. Two's no
company. Don't you say so, cap'n?"

"I prefer to choose my company, that's all I say," the cap'n answered
gallantly.

Jake looked from one to the other and then back again. What he saw
scarcely pleased him, but it had to be accepted.

"All right," said he. "If you want a boarder, no reason why you
shouldn't have one. I'll shut up my place to-morrer."

The red surged up into Mariana's cheeks. She had not known it was easy
to cause such gates to open.

"When's Mandy goin'?" she asked indifferently.

"Week from Wednesday," said the cap'n. He was suffused with joy, and
Mariana, in one of those queer ways she had of thinking of inapposite
things, remembered him as she saw him once when, at the age of fourteen,
he sat before a plate of griddle-cakes and saw the syrup-pitcher coming.

"Thursday, then," she said. "I'll be along bright and early."

She rose and set her chair against the wall. That seemed as if they were
to go.

"You'd better by half stay where you be in your own home," she called
after Jake, shutting the door behind him. "You won't like settin' at
other folks' tables. You've set too long at your own."

He came back, and left the cap'n waiting for him in the path. There he
stood before her, the gaunt, big shape she had watched and brooded over
so many years. Something seemed to be moving in his brain, and he gave
it difficult expression.

"Depends on who else's settin' at the table," he remarked, and vanished
into the night.

Mariana, moved and wondering, wanted to call after him and ask him what
he meant; but she reflected that the women who inspired such speeches
probably refrained from insisting too crudely on their value. Then she
flew to the bedroom and began to sort her things for packing.

In two weeks she was settled at the cap'n's, and Jake Preble had come to