y for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes
and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you'd like to
stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave
with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that
he'd saved that particular smile for you. He was no better built than
a hundred other men I knew who were going fishing, and he was no
bigger than a thousand others sailing out of Gloucester, and not near
so big as a lot of others--five feet ten or eleven, maybe, he was,
with level shoulders, and very light on his feet--but looking at him
you knew he was all there.

After smoking a while and watching him between puffs, it flashed on me
all at once that I was pretty thick. A word or two my cousin Nell had
let slip--not so much what she said as the way she said it--gave me a
hint of a whole lot of things. Looking at Maurice now I asked him if
he had seen my cousin or Miss Foster lately.

He flushed up as he looked at me, and I saw that whatever he was
thinking of it had not been far away from what I had been thinking
of. "No, I haven't seen them"--slowly. "How is your cousin?"

"Oh, she seems to be all right. They were both in to the store this
morning."

"What doing?" I thought he was beginning to worry, but I tried not to
let on that I noticed it. I was beginning to feel like a sleuth, or a
detective, or a diplomat, or something.

"Well, I don't know. Nell said they came in to see me, but all that
happened that I had any hand in was to weigh her. She gained another
pound last week, and it's worrying her. The more exercise she takes
the heavier she gets, she says. She's a hundred and thirty-one now. Of
course, while they're there Withrow had to help out and make himself
agreeable, especially to Miss Foster, but I can't see that she warms
up to him."

"Ha? No? You don't think so?"

"Not much, but maybe it's her way. She's pretty frosty generally
anyway, different from my cousin--she's something like."

"Yes, your cousin is all right," said Maurice.

"You bet," I said. "She don't stand around and chill the air."

"Why--does Miss Foster always? Is that her way? I--don't--know--much
about her."

"Well, I don't know so very much myself--mostly what my cousin tells
me. Still, I guess she's all right; but she strikes me as one of the
kind that might make an awful lot of a man and never let on until she
was dead sure of him."

"H-m--That means she could think a