“I don’t know,” he said, pursing his lips.  “I don’t know, gal, as anybody is driving you away from Wreckers’ Head and them that loves ye here.”

She was speechless.  She gazed at him with drenched eyes, her face quivering uncontrollably.  A hand pressed tightly to her breast seemed endeavoring to still the wild fluttering there.

“I don’t know,” he repeated, “that we got much to offer a gal like you, and that’s a fact.  We learned to know you pretty well while you stayed with us, Prue and me did.  Somehow, we can’t just seem to get the straight of what you told us that night you left.  It—­it ain’t possible that you made some mistake, is it?  Mebbe you was talking about some other gal?”

“Oh, Cap’n Ball!” she sighed.  “I am able to tell you nothing that will change your opinion of me.”

“Well, I don’t know.  I don’t know.  What you did say,” he observed in that same reflective, gentle tone, “didn’t seem to change our opinion much.  Not mine and Prudence’s.”

“Cap’n Ball!”

“No,” he went on, wagging his head.  “You committing such a fault as you say you was accused of, and you coming down here as you did, through a trick—­somehow those facts, if they be facts, don’t seem to have much effect on our opinion.  Me and the old woman feel that somehow—­we don’t know how—­what you told us that night and what you done for us before that night don’t fit together nohow.”

She stared at him without understanding.  He cleared his throat and mopped his brow again with the big silk handkerchief.

“No, gal, we can’t understand how anybody as good and loving as you have been to us can be at heart as bad as—­as other folks might try to make out.  Fact is, we know you can’t be bad.”

“What—­what do you mean, Cap’n Ball?” she asked faintly.

“I swan!  I tell ye what I’m getting at,” burst out the old man.  “We want you to come back.  Prudence, she wants you to come back.  I swan!  I want you to come back.  Why, even that dratted Queen of Sheby needs you, Ida May—­or, whatever your name is!  We’ve got to have you!”

“Prudence can’t scurcely get around the house.  And that niece of hers sits there like a stick or a stun, not willin’ to scurce lift her hand to help.  Thank the Lord she’s goin’ home to-day.  Her visit’s come to an end.  She don’t like it down here.  She says we’re all a set of—­er—­hicks, I believe she calls us.

“Howsomever, we’re all high and dry on the reefs, gal, and it seems likely you’re the only one can get us off.  You ain’t got to go away from here, if you don’t want to.  I’ve made it pretty average plain to that Bostwick gal that no matter what happens, she’s got no expectations as far as Prudence and me are concerned.  It was money and nothing but money she was after.  Her being Prudence’s niece in kind of a far-fetched way don’t make it our duty—­not even our Christian duty, as Elder Minnett calls it—­to keep a gal in the house that we don’t want, nor yet die at her convenience and leave her our money.  And so I’ll tell the elder if he undertakes to put his spoon in the dish again.”