He turned his small, loving, boar-like eyes upon her as a preternaturally innocent and trusting companion of Ulysses might have regarded the transforming Circe.  Rosey turned away with the faintest sigh.  The habitual look of abstraction returned to her eyes as if she had once more taken refuge in her own ideal world.  Unfortunately the change did not escape either the sensitive observation or the fatuous misconception of the sagacious parent.  “Ye’ll be mountin’ a few furbelows and fixins, Rosey, I reckon, ez only natural.  Mebbee ye’ll have to prink up a little now that we’ve got a gentleman contractor in the ship.  I’ll see what I kin pick up in Montgomery Street.”  And indeed he succeeded a few hours later in accomplishing with equal infelicity his generous design.  When she returned from her household tasks she found on her berth a purple velvet bonnet of extraordinary make, and a pair of white satin slippers.  “They’ll do for a start-off, Rosey,” he explained, “and I got ’em at my figgers.”

“But I go out so seldom, father; and a bonnet”—­

“That’s so,” interrupted Mr. Nott, complacently, “it might be jest ez well for a young gal like yer to appear ez if she did go out, or would go out if she wanted to.  So you kin be wearin’ that ar headstall kinder like this evening when the contractor’s here, ez if you’d jest come in from a pasear.”

Miss Rosey did not however immediately avail herself of her father’s purchase, but contented herself with the usual scarlet ribbon that like a snood confined her brown hair, when she returned to her tasks.  The space between the galley and the bulwarks had been her favorite resort in summer when not actually engaged in household work.  It was now lightly roofed over with boards and tarpaulin against the winter rain, but still afforded her a veranda-like space before the galley door, where she could read or sew, looking over the bow of the Pontiac to the tossing bay or the farther range of the Contra Costa hills.

Hither Miss Rosey brought the purple prodigy, partly to please her father, partly with a view of subjecting it to violent radical changes.  But after trying it on before the tiny mirror in the galley once or twice, her thoughts wandered away, and she fell into one of her habitual reveries seated on a little stool before the galley door.

She was aroused from it by the slight shaking and rattling of the doors of a small hatch on the deck, not a dozen yards from where she sat.  It had been evidently fastened from below during the wet weather, but as she gazed, the fastenings were removed, the doors were suddenly lifted, and the head and shoulders of a young man emerged from the deck.  Partly from her father’s description, and partly from the impossibility of its being anybody else, she at once conceived it to be the new lodger.  She had time to note that he was young and good-looking, graver perhaps than became his sudden pantomimic appearance,