“On the Cape?  My stars!  I never knowed she had any country relatives.  Are they rich?  They ain’t died and left her a fortune, have they?” were the eager questions.

“The ones I speak of are still alive,” Tunis said gravely, backing up the steps to the sidewalk.  “Thank you, ma’am.  I’ll go to that store and speak to her there.  Thank you.”

Before she could evolve another question, Tunis had escaped.  He walked smartly away, not only to outdistance the lodging-house keeper’s voice, but because he was confused and disappointed.  Ida May Bostwick could not work in a department store and in an eating house as well.  Of course not!  And now that this point was an established fact in his mind, he admitted that he had been utterly foolish to imagine for a moment that he had already met her, that she was the violet-eyed girl in whom he had taken an interest.

Right at the start he had known that a girl working in an eating house like that was not the sort of person he could introduce to Aunt Lucretia.  And so why had he imagined that she would prove to be the great-niece of Prudence Ball?  It was ridiculous!

Of course, this Ida May came of good Cape stock.  At least, on one side of her family.  The Honeys were as good as the Lathams or the Balls.

Thus condemning his foolish fancies he strode downtown again.  He knew where Hoskin & Marl’s was.  He had been in the place.  When he reached the department store he marched straight in, meaning to have an immediate interview with the girl at the lace counter.

CHAPTER VI

AN UNSATISFACTORY INTERVIEW

Tunis Latham suffered all the timidity of the average man when he got into the maze of that department store.  There is a psychological reason for the haberdashery goods, the line for the mere male, being placed always within sight of a principal exit.  The catacombs of Rome would be no more terrifying in prospect for a man than a venture into the farther intricacies of Hoskin & Marl’s.

The captain of the Seamew could box the compass with the next seafarer, but he lost all idea of the points on the card before he had been three minutes in the store, and he had to hail a floor-walker to get his bearings.

“Lace counter?  Right this way, sir.  Yes, sir.  Just over there.  Our—­er—­Miss Bostwick will serve you, sir.  Forward!”

The wind and sun had heightened Tunis Latham’s naturally florid complexion to about as deep a red as can easily be imagined, but he felt the back of his neck and his ears burning as he approached the counter to which he was directed.  A girl had detached herself from a group at the farther end, and now came toward him.  All that he first saw clearly, however, was a pair of eyes staring at him from behind the counter.  They were not violet eyes.

The girl who owned those twinkling, needle-sharp eyes was nothing like that girl he had been thinking of so much since his previous visit to Boston.  She was rather small, dressed in the extreme mode in a cheap way, wearing a tawdry gilt chain, several rings, and a wrist watch.  There was something about her which reminded Tunis very strongly of the girls of Portygee Town, although she was a pronounced blonde.