bout
five minutes."

The face of Miss Port now grew radiant, and she pulled her chair nearer
to Captain Asher. "Tell me," said she, "is he really anybody?"

"He is a good deal of a body," answered the captain. "I should say he is
pretty nearly six feet high, and of considerable bigness."

"Well!" exclaimed Miss Port, "I'd thought he was a little dried-up sort
of a mummy man that you might hang up on a nail and be sure you'd find
him when you got back. Did he talk?"

"Oh, yes," said the captain, "he talked a good deal."

"And what did he tell you?"

"He did not tell me anything, but he asked a lot of questions."

"What about?" said Miss Port quickly.

"Everything. Fishing, gunning, crops, weather, people."

"Well, well!" she exclaimed. "And don't you suppose his wife could have
told him all that, and she's been livin' here--this is the second
summer. Did he say how long he's goin' to stay?"

"No."

"And you didn't ask him?"

"I told you he asked the questions," replied the captain.

"Well, I wish I'd been here," Miss Port remarked fervently. "I'd got
something out of him."

"No doubt of that," thought the captain, but he did not say so.

"If he expects to pass himself off as just a common man," continued Miss
Port, "that's goin' to spend the rest of his summer here with his
family, he can't do it. He's first got to explain why he never came near
that young woman and her two babies for the whole of last summer, and,
so far as I've heard, he was never mentioned by her. I think, Captain
Asher, that for the sake of the neighborhood, if you don't care about
such things yourself, you might have made use of this opportunity. As
far as I know, you're the only person in or about Glenford that's spoke
to him."

The captain smiled. "Sometimes, I suppose," said he, "I don't say
enough, and sometimes I say too much, but--"

"Then I wish he'd struck you more on an average," interrupted Miss Port.
"But there's no use talkin' any more about it. I hired a horse and a
carriage and a boy to come out here this mornin' to ask you about that
man. And what's come of it? You haven't got a single thing to tell
anybody except that he's big."

The captain changed the subject again. "How is your father?" he asked.

"Pop's just the same as he always is," was the answer. "And now, as I
don't want to lose the whole of the seventy-five cents I've got to pay,
suppose you call in that niece of yours, and let me have a talk with
h