“Wish I was goin’ with ye,” he said heartily.  “Would, too, if I could shut up shop.  But I promised Abe I’d stay by the ship till he come home again.”

Louise introduced her uncle to Mr. Bane; but during the bustle of getting into the skiff and pushing off she overlooked the fact that Lawford and the actor were not introduced.

“Bring us home a mess of tautog,” Cap’n Amazon shouted.  “I sartainly do fancy blackfish when they’re cooked right.  Bile ’em, an’ serve with an egg sauce, is my way o’ puttin’ ’em on the table.”

“That was Cap’n Abe’s way, too,” muttered Betty.

The cloud on Lawford Tapp’s countenance did not lift immediately as he sculled them out to the anchored sloop.  Louise saw quickly that his ill humor was for Bane.

“I must keep this young man at a distance,” she thought, as she waved her hand to Uncle Amazon and Mr. Bane.  “He takes too much for granted, I fear.  Perhaps, after all, I should have excused myself from this adventure.”

She eyed Lawford covertly as, with swelling muscles and lithe, swinging body, he drove his sculling oar.  “But he does look more ’to the manner born’—­much more the man, in fact—­than that actor!”

Lawford could not for long forget his duty as host, and he was as cheerful and obliging as usual by the time the three had scrambled aboard the Merry Andrew.

Immediately Betty Gallup cast aside her skirt and stood forth untrammeled in the overalls.  “Gimme my way and I’d wear ’em doin’ housework and makin’ my garding,” she declared.  “Land sakes!  I allus did despise women’s fooleries.”

Louise laughed blithely.

“Why, Betty,” she said, “lots of city women who do their own housework don ‘knickers’ or gymnasium suits to work in.  No excuse is needed.”

“Humph!” commented the old woman.  “I had no idee city women had so much sense.  The ones I see down here on the Cape don’t show it.”

The morning breeze was light but steady.  The Merry Andrew was a sweetly sailing boat and Lawford handled her to the open admiration of Betty Gallup.  The old woman’s comment would have put suspicion in Louise’s mind had the girl not been utterly blind to the actual identity of the sloop’s owner.

“Humph! you’re the only furiner, Lawford Tapp, I ever see who could sail a smack proper.  But you got Cape blood in you—­that’s what ’tis.”

“Thank you, Betty,” he returned, with the ready smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes.  “That is a compliment indeed.”

The surf only moaned to-day over Gull Rocks, for there was little ground swell.  The waves heaved in, with an oily, leisurely motion and, it being full sea, merely broke with a streak of foam marking the ugly reef below.

A little to the seaward side of the apex of the reef Betty, at a word from Lawford, cast loose the sheet and then dropped the anchor.