“What errand?  I cannot imagine.”

“There are two old people down on the Cape that I am much interested in.  They live near my home.”

He told her quietly, yet with earnestness, about Cap’n Ira and Prudence.  He described their home and their need of some young person to live with them, somebody who would not only help them, but who would love to help them.  Then he related, perhaps rather tartly, his experience with Ida May Bostwick.

“What a foolish girl!” she breathed.  “And she would not accept a chance like that?”

“Lucky for Cap’n Ira and for Aunt Prue that she won’t take up with their offer,” he said grimly.  “But I dread taking back word to them about her.  It will be hard to make them understand.  And then, they need the help a good girl could give them.”

“Captain Latham, if I only had a chance like that!” she exclaimed.  “I’d work my fingers to the bone for a home like that, for shelter, and kindness, and—­and—­oh, well, some girls have all the best of it, I guess!”

She sighed.  It was half a sob.  He saw her hands clasp tightly before her in the dusk.  The gesture was like a prayer.  He knew that her pale face was flushed with earnestness.  He cleared his throat.

“You have the chance, if you want it, Miss Macklin,” he said.

CHAPTER X

THE PLOT

There was a long minute of utter silence following Tunis Latham’s last words.  Then the girl’s whisper, tense, yet shaking like a frightened child’s: 

“You do not know what you are saying.”

“I know exactly what I am saying,” he replied.

“They—­they would not have me.”

“They will welcome you—­gladly.”

“Never!  I am a stranger.  They must be told all about me.  They could never welcome Sheila Macklin.”

He knew that.  He knew it only too well.  She was just the sort of girl to make Cap’n Ira Ball and Prudence happy, to bring to their latter years the comfort and joy the old couple should have.  But the Puritanism which, after all, ingrained their characters would never allow the Balls to welcome a girl with the stain Sheila Macklin bore upon her name.  Tunis remembered clearly how scornfully Cap’n Ira had spoken of the possibility of their taking in a girl from the poor farm.  Pride of family and of name is inbred in their class of New Englanders.

The old people wanted a girl whom they could love and look upon as their own.  They would welcome nobody else.  They had set their minds and hearts upon Ida May Bostwick.  The fact that Ida May failed to come up to their expectations, that she was perfectly worthless and inconsequential, did not open the way for another girl to be substituted for Ida May.  Possibly Tunis might be successful in an attempt to interest the Balls in Sheila Macklin’s case.  But the girl did not want charity, not charity as the word is used in its general and harsher sense.