fulest surprise. Something I want to show you just because I
love you, Aunt Kate."

Katie's eyes brooded over him. "Dear little chappie, and Aunt Kate's a
cross mean old thing, isn't she?"

"Not if she'll stop the boat," said crafty Worth.

She laughed and surveyed the shore. It looked feasible. "I'm very
'easy,' Worth. Just don't get it into your head all the world is as
easy as I am."

The little boy and the dog were out before she had made her landing. They
were running through the brush. "Worth," she called, "don't go far. Don't
go out of sound."

"No," he called back excitedly, "'tain't far."

She was anxious, reproaching herself as absurd and rash, and was just
attempting to ground the boat and follow when Queen came bounding back.
Then came Worth's voice: "Here 'tis! Here's Aunt Kate--waiting for you!"

Next there emerged from the brush a flushed and triumphant little boy,
and after him came a somewhat less flushed and less obviously
triumphant man.

CHAPTER XVIII

Her first emotion was fury at herself. She must be losing her mind not to
have suspected!

Then the fury overflowed on Worth and his companion. It reached
high-water mark with the stranger's smile.

And there dissolved; or rather, flowed into a savage interest, for the
smile enticed her to mark what manner of man he was. And as she looked,
the interest shed the savagery.

His sleeves were rolled up; he had no hat, no coat. He had been working
with something muddy. A young man, a large man, and strong. The first
thing which she saw as distinctive was the way his smile lived on in
his eyes after it had died on his lips, as if his thought was smiling
at the smile.

Even in that first outraged, panic-stricken moment Katie Jones knew she
had never known a man like that.

"Here he is, Aunt Kate!" cried her young nephew, dancing up and down.
"This is him!"

It was not a presentation calculated to set Katie at ease. She sought
refuge in a frigid: "I beg pardon?"

But that was quite lost on Worth. "Why, Aunt Kate, don't you know him?
You said you'd rather see him than anybody now living! Don't you know,
Aunt Kate--the man that mends the boats?"

It seemed that in proclaiming their name for him Worth was shamelessly
proclaiming it all: her conversations, the intimacy to which she had
admitted him, her delight in him--yes, _need_ of him. "But I thought,"
she murmured, as if in justification, "that you had a long white beard!"

And