She put a hand gently on his arm to quiet his excitement, for others were passing.  Her eyes glowed up into his for an instant.  Her lips parted in a happier smile than he had seen on them before.

“Then you will not get up from this bench, Captain Latham, and excuse yourself?  I should not blame you if you did so.”

“Do you think I’m that kind of a fellow?” he demanded bluntly.

“I—­I told you I thought I had quite read your character in your face.  But that is no reason why I should take advantage of your kindness to do you harm.”

“Harm?  How do you mean, ‘harm?’”

“Sheila Macklin is a creature from a reformatory.  She has been sentenced by a magistrate.  She was arrested by the police.  She was accused by her employers of theft, and the theft was proved.  If any of your friends should see you with me, and I should be identified as the Sheila Macklin who was sentenced for stealing—­”

“Cat’s foot!” ejaculated Tunis with a sudden reversion to his usual cheerful manner.  “Are you going through the rest of your life feeling like that?”

“Why shouldn’t I?  I am always expecting somebody to see and recognize me.  Even in Sellers’ place.  That man this evening, when he called me ’jailbird’—­”

“I wish I had wrung his neck!” exclaimed the captain of the Seamew heartily.

“I appreciate your kindness.”  Her eyes twinkled.  For a moment he caught a glimpse of what Sheila Macklin must have been before tragedy had come into her life.  “You are a good, kind man, Captain Latham.”

“You just look on me as though I were your brother,” he said sturdily.  “You are not going to be alone any more, not really.  If you had had friends before, when it happened, somebody to speak for you, I am sure nothing like what did happen to you could have happened.”

“I come of respectable people,” she said quietly.  “But they are all dead.  I was an orphan before I came to Boston.  The friends I had in the little inland town I came from would not have understood.  They did not approve of my coming to the city at all.  Oh, I wish I had not come!”

“And now you ought not to stay here.  Should you?”

“What can I do?  I must support myself.  I cannot go back.  I could not explain those two years.  Yet I am always expecting somebody to make inquiry for Sheila Macklin.  And then I cannot conceal my story longer.”

He nodded thoughtfully.  It seemed that, once she had opened the dam of speech, she was glad to talk about herself and her trouble.

“I do hate the city.  I have been so unhappy here.  If I were only a man I would start right out into the country.  I would tramp until I found a place to work.  You don’t know what it means to be a girl, Captain Latham, and be in trouble.”

“I guess all city girls aren’t alike after all,” he said with a short laugh.  Then he looked at her keenly again.  “Do you know what sort of an errand brought me up into the city from T-Wharf to-day?”