“I don’t want to stay here.  I’ve seen enough of this place and you all!  And I would be ashamed to stay any longer than I can help with folks that take in such a girl as she is.”

Again Ida May’s little claw indicated Sheila, who stared, speechless, helpless, at least for the time being.  The harassed girl could fight for herself no longer.  She knew that she was on the verge of betrayal.  She could not stem the tide of Ida May’s venom.  The latter must make the revelation which had threatened ever since she had come to Wreckers’ Head.  There was no way of longer smothering the truth.  It would come out!

“Look here,” Cap’n Ira said, his curiosity finally aroused, “the elder says you ain’t crazy!  But it looks to me—­”

“I’m not crazy, I can tell you,” snapped Ida May, taking him up short.  “But I guess you and Aunt Prue must be.  Why, you don’t even know the name of this girl you took in instead of me—­in my rightful place.  But I can tell you who she is—­and what she’s done.  I remember her now.  I knew I’d seen her before—­the hussy!”

“Belay that!” exclaimed Cap’n Ira.

But he said it faintly.  He was looking at the other girl now, and something in her expression and in her attitude made him lose confidence.  His voice died in his throat.  Ida May Bostwick had the upper hand at last—­and she kept it.

“Look at her,” she exulted, the green lights in her brown eyes glinting like the sparkling eyes of a serpent.  “Look at her.  She knows that I know.  She’s come down here and fooled you all, but she can’t fool you any longer.  And that Tunis Latham!  Why, it can’t be possible he knew what she was from the first!”

“See here,” said Cap’n Ira shakily.  “What do you mean?  What are you getting at—­or trying to?  If you got anything to say about Ida May, get it out and be over with it.”

“Oh, Ira!  Don’t!  Stop her!” wailed Prudence.

Like the old man, Prudence finally realized that there was something wrong—­something very wrong, indeed—­with the girl they had known for months as Ida May and whom they had learned to love so dearly.

Nobody looking at Sheila could doubt this for a moment.  Her tortured expression of countenance, the wild light in her eyes, her trembling lips, advertised to the beholders that the last bastion of her fortress was taken, that the wall was breached and into that breach now marched the triumphant phrases of the real Ida May’s bitter, gloating speech.

“Look at her!” repeated the latter.  “She can’t deny it now.  She knows I know her and what she is.  Why, Aunt Prue—­and you, Captain Ball—­have been fooled nice, I must say.  And that Tunis Latham!  Well, he can’t be much!”

“Don’t—­don’t say anything against Tunis!”

It was not a voice at all like the usual mellow tones of Sheila Macklin which uttered those faint words.  Hoarse, strained, uncertain, there was yet a note of command in the phrase which had its influence on the wildly excited Ida May.