After her interview with Elder Minnett, although she had refrained from detailing her story and her spiteful comments about Sheila and Tunis Latham to the Paulings, she had not ceased to question Zebedee and his mother about the financial condition of the Balls.

She had learned that a couple of thousand dollars would probably buy all the real property the old people owned on Wreckers’ Head.  There was a certain invested sum which secured them a fair living.  Beyond that, the Big Wreck Cove people knew of no wealth belonging to either Cap’n Ira or Prudence.

Ida May already considered that she had come down here to the Cape on a fool’s errand.  She would like to make herself solid, however, with the old folks so as to benefit when they were dead and gone, if that were possible.  But to make herself a kitchen drudge for them?  She would like to see herself!

There was a phase of the situation which held Ida May to the course she had set sail upon, and one which would hold her to it to the bitter end.  Her spitefulness and determination to be revenged upon this unknown girl who had usurped the place originally offered her by the Balls, and who had stolen her name as well, was quite sufficient to cause a person of Ida May Bostwick’s character to fight for her rights.

She would be revenged on Tunis, too.  Or, at least, she would make him, as well as the other girl, suffer for the slight he had put upon her.

Had she not preened her feathers and strutted her very best on the occasion when he interviewed her at Hoskin & Marl’s and taken her out to lunch?  And to no end at all!  He had been quite unimpressed by Ida May’s airs and graces.

Yet he would take up with this other girl—­a mere nobody.  Worse than a nobody, of course.  She must be both a bad and a cunning woman to have done what it was plain she had done.  She had wound Tunis Latham around her finger, and had hoodwinked the old people in the bargain!

Ida May saw the other girl waiting on Prudence and Cap’n Ira; she observed her tenderness toward them and their delight in her ministrations; and these things which she regarded with her green-glinting eyes made her taste the bitterness of wormwood.  She hated Sheila more and more as the day wore on; and she scorned the old people both for what she considered this niggardliness and for their simplicity, as well, in being fooled by this other girl.

For, of course, to Ida May’s mind, Sheila’s kindness and the love shown for the Balls on her part was all put on.  It could not be otherwise.  Ida May Bostwick could not, in the first place, imagine any sane girl “falling for the two old hicks.”

Prudence could seldom show herself other than kindly toward any person whether she exactly approved of that person or not.  So she chatted cheerfully at Ida May, if not with her.  She was quite as insistent as Cap’n Ira, however, in keeping away from the vexing question of the identity of the two girls.