nodding. Captain Price hesitated; then he put his pipe in his pocket and followed her into the parlor. “Sit down,” she cried, gayly. “Well, Alfred!”

“Well—Mrs. North!” he said; and then they both laughed, and she began to ask questions: Who was dead? Who had so and so married? “There are not many of us left,” she said. “The two Ferris girls and Theophilus Morrison and Johnny Gordon—he came to see me yesterday. And Matty Dilworth; she was younger than I—oh, by ten years. She married the oldest Barkley boy, didn’t she? I hear he didn’t turn out well. You married his sister, didn’t you? Was it the oldest girl or the second sister?”

“It was the second—Jane. Yes, poor Jane. I lost her in ’forty-five.”

“You have children?” she said, sympathetically.

“I’ve got a boy,” he said; “but he’s married.”

“My girl has never married; she’s a good daughter,”—Mrs. North broke off with a nervous laugh; “here she is, now!”

Mary North, who had suddenly appeared in the doorway, gave a questioning sniff, and the Captain’s hand sought his guilty pocket; but Miss North only said: “How do you do, sir? Now, mother, don’t talk too much and get tired.” She stopped and tried to smile, but the painful color came into her face. “And—if you please, Captain Price, will you speak in a low tone? Large, noisy persons exhaust the oxygen in the air, and—”

“Mary!” cried poor Mrs. North; but the Captain, clutching his old felt hat, began to hoist himself up from the sofa, scattering ashes about as he did so. Mary North compressed her lips.

“I tell my daughter-in-law they’ll keep the moths away,” the old gentleman said, sheepishly.

“I use camphor,” said Miss North, “Flora must bring a dust-pan.”

“Flora?” Alfred Price said. “Now, what’s my association with that name?”

“She was our old cook,” Mrs. North explained; “this Flora is her daughter. But you never saw old Flora?”

“Why, yes, I did,” the old man said, slowly. “Yes. I remember Flora. Well, good-bye,—Mrs. North.”

“Good-bye, Alfred. Come again,” she said, cheerfully.

“Mother, here’s your beef tea,” said a brief voice.

Alfred Price fled. He met his son just as he was entering his own house, and burst into a confidence: “Cy, my boy, come aft and splice the main-brace. Cyrus, what a female! She knocked me higher than Gilroy’s kite. And her mother was as sweet a girl as you ever saw!” He drew his son into a little, low-browed, dingy room at the end of the hall. Its grimy untidiness matched the old Captain’s clothes, but it was his one spot of refuge in his own house; here he could scatter his tobacco ashes almost unrebuked, and play on his harmonicon without seeing Gussie wince and draw in her breath; for Mrs. Cyrus rarely entered the “cabin.” “I worry so about its disorderliness that I won’t go in,” she used to say, in a resigned way. And the Captain accepted her decision with resignation of his own. “Crafts of your bottom can’t navigate in these waters,” he agreed, earnestly; and, indeed, the room was so cluttered with his belongings that voluminous hoop-skirts could not get steerageway. “He has so much rubbish,” Gussie complained; but it was precious rubbish to the old man. His chest was behind the door; a blow-fish, stuffed and varnished, hung from the ceiling; two colored prints of the “Barque Letty M., 800 tons,” decorated the walls; his sextant, polished daily by his big, clumsy hands, hung over the mantel-piece, on which were many dusty treasures—the mahogany spoke of an old steering-wheel; a whale’s tooth; two Chinese wrestlers, in ivory; a fan of spreading white coral; a conch-shell, its beautiful red lip serving to hold a loose bunch of cigars. In the chimney-breast was a little door, and the Captain, pulling his son into the room after that call upon Mrs. North, fumbled in his pocket for the key. “Here,” he said; “(as the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina)—Cyrus, she handed round beef tea!”

But Cyrus was to receive still further enlightenment on the subject of his opposite neighbor:

“She called him in. I heard her, with my own ears! ‘Alfred,’ she said, ‘come in.’ Cyrus, she has designs; oh, I worry so about it! He ought to be protected. He is very old, and, of course, foolish. You ought to check it at once.”

“Gussie, I don’t like you to talk that way about my father,” Cyrus began.

“You’ll like it less later on. He’ll go and see her to-morrow.”

“Why shouldn’t he go and see her to-morrow?” Cyrus said, and added a modest bad word; which made Gussie cry. And yet, in spite of what his wife called his “blasphemy,” Cyrus began to be vaguely uncomfortable whenever he saw his father put his pipe in his pocket and go across the street. And as the winter brightened into spring, the Captain went quite often. So, for that matter, did other old friends of Mrs. North’s generation, who by-and-by began to smile at one another, and say, “Well, Alfred and Letty are great friends!” For, because Captain Price lived right across the street, he went most of all. At least, that was what Miss North said to herself with obvious common-sense—until Mrs. Cyrus put her on the right track....

“What!” gasped Mary North. “But it’s impossible!”

“It would be very unbecoming, considering their years,” said Gussie; “but I worry so, because, you know, nothing is impossible when people are foolish; and of course, at their age, they are apt to be foolish.”

So the seed was dropped. Certainly he did come very often. Certainly her mother seemed very glad to see him. Certainly they had very long talks. Mary North shivered with apprehension. But it was not until a week later that this miserable suspicion grew strong enough to find words. It was after tea, and the two ladies were sitting before a little fire. Mary North had wrapped a shawl about her mother, and given her a footstool, and pushed her chair nearer the fire, and then pulled it away, and opened and shut the parlor door three times to regulate the draught. Then she sat down in the corner of the sofa, exhausted but alert.

“If there’s anything you want, mother, you’ll be sure and tell me?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“I think I’d better put another shawl over your limbs?”

“Oh no, indeed!”

“Mother, are you sure you don’t feel a draught?”

“No, Mary; and it wouldn’t hurt me if I did!”

“I was only trying to make you comfortable—”

“I know that, my dear; you are a very good daughter. Mary, I think it would be nice if I made a cake. So many people call, and—”

“I’ll make it to-morrow.”

“Oh, I’ll make it myself,” Mrs. North protested, eagerly; “I’d really enjoy—”

“Mother! Tire yourself out in the kitchen? No, indeed! Flora and I will see to it.”

Mrs. North sighed.

Her daughter sighed too; then suddenly burst out: “Old Captain Price comes here pretty often.”

Mrs. North nodded pleasantly. “That daughter-in-law doesn’t half take care of him. His clothes are dreadfully shabby. There was a button off his coat to-day. And she’s a foolish creature.”