We’d been talking in a pretty low tone, because mother was asleep; and just as she’d finished the other ear, and a little drop of blood stood up on it like a live ruby, the door opened and Dan and Mr. Gabriel came in.  There never was a prettier picture than Faith at that moment, and so the young stranger thought, for he stared at her, smiling and at ease, just as if she’d been hung in a gallery and he’d bought a ticket.  So then he sat down and repeated to Dan and mother what she’d told me, and he promised to send for the papers to prove it all.  But he never did send for them,—­delaying and delaying, till the summer wore away; and perhaps there were such papers and perhaps there weren’t.  I’ve always thought he didn’t want his own friends to know where he was.  Dan might be a rich man to-day, if he chose to look them up; but he’d scorch at a slow fire before he’d touch a copper of it.  Father never believed a word about it, when we recited it again to him.

“So Faith ’a come into her fortune, has she?” said he.  “Pretty child!  She ’a’n’t had so much before sence she fell heir to old Miss Devereux’s best chany, her six silver spoons, and her surname.”

So the days passed, and the greater part of every one Mr. Gabriel was dabbling in the water somewhere.  There wasn’t a brook within ten miles that he didn’t empty of trout, for Dan knew the woods as well as the shores, and he knew the clear nights when the insects can keep free from the water so that next day the fish rise hungry to the surface; and so sometimes in the brightest of May noons they’d bring home a string of those beauties, speckled with little tongues of flame; and Mr. Gabriel would have them cooked, and make us all taste them,—­for we don’t care much for that sort, down here on the Flats; we should think we were famished, if we had to eat fish.  And then they’d lie in wait all day for the darting pickerel in the little Stream of Shadows above; and when it came June, up the river he went trolling for bass, and he used a different sort of bait from the rest,—­bass won’t bite much at clams,—­and he hauled in great forty-pounders.  And sometimes in the afternoons he took out Faith and me,—­for, as Faith would go, whether or no, I always made it a point to put by everything and go too; and I used to try and get some of the other girls in, but Mr. Gabriel never would take them, though he was hail-fellow-well-met with everybody, and was everybody’s favorite, and it was known all round how he found out Faith, and that alone made him so popular, that I do believe, if he’d only taken out naturalization-papers, we’d have sent him to General Court.  And then it grew time for the river-mackerel, and they used to bring in at sunset two or three hundred in a shining heap, together with great lobsters that looked as if they’d been carved out of heliotrope-stone, and so old that they were barnacled.  And it was so novel to Mr. Gabriel, that he used to act as if he’d fallen in fairy-land.