“Now, you know, Ira, Sarah was an orphan and I was her mother’s only relation—­and only that in a kind of a left-handed way, for I wasn’t really her aunt.  That branch of the Honeys—­Sarah’s father’s folks—­had all died out.  Sarah lived about—­kinder from pillar to post as you might say—­till she went to Boston and met Mr. Bostwick.  Isn’t that so, Ida May?”

“Yes.  So I understand,” agreed the girl faintly.

“Now, you don’t remember your mother much, Ida May,” pursued Prudence confidently.  “You was too young when she died.  And you being brought up among the Bostwicks, you didn’t know much about us down here on the Cape.  But don’t you remember any neighbor that lived near you there in Boston that had a gal something like this crazy one that come here?”

“I swan!” ejaculated Cap’n Ira.  “You’re coming out strong, old woman, I do say.”

Sheila could only shake her head.

“Why, see,” said Prudence, encouraged by her husband’s commendation, “there might have been a neighbor woman that Sarah—­your mother, you know, Ida May—­was close acquainted with.  Maybe she used to talk with this neighbor a good deal about her young days, and how she lived down here.  You know women often gossip that way.”

“I’ll say they do!” put in Cap’n Ira, tapping the knob of his cane.

“Well, now,” said the old woman, greatly interested in her own idea, and a little proud of it, “suppose that neighbor had a little girl who heard all these things Sarah Bostwick might have said.  And if that child’s brain wasn’t just right—­if she was a little weak-minded, poor thing—­what’s more reasonable than that she treasured it all up in her mind and after years, in one of her spells of weak-mindedness, she got the idea she was Ida May Bostwick, and determined to come here and visit us!”

“I swan, Prudence!” exclaimed Cap’n Ira.  “It’s like a story-book—­a reg’lar novel.”

“Well, it might be,” said his wife, smiling quite proudly.

“Only after all, that gal didn’t seem so very weak-minded,” muttered Cap’n Ira.  “She seemed more mean and ugly than weak.”

Sheila had thought somewhat along this line herself.  At least, she knew how weak the real Ida May’s story must sound to most people in the neighborhood, unless the claimant had actual proof of birth and name to bolster her attempt to win the Balls.  There was but a tenuous thread connecting Ida May with Big Wreck Cove, or any other part of Cape Cod.  The Bostwicks—­the girl’s immediate family, at least—­were dead.

These facts, already gathered by Sheila from Aunt Prudence’s conversation with the neighboring women, were the foundation on which she had built her desperate hope of keeping up the deception and thwarting the other girl, no matter how bitterly the latter might press her claim.

Nor was she, Sheila felt, depriving Ida May of anything which the latter, if she obtained it, would actually prize.  The shallow girl was not the sort of person to appreciate the kindness of the two old people or give them any comfort and sympathy in return.  Why, both Cap’n Ira and Prudence already shrank from the new claimant!