“The old bell is welcoming us, Ida May,” Captain Latham said to the girl who reclined in a canvas chair which the cook had raked out of the lazaret for her use.  “I’ve beat my way in here when it hasn’t sounded so cheerful.”

“I am wondering what sort of welcome I shall receive when we get to—­Wreckers’ Head, do you call it?” she asked softly.

“That’ll be all right, too,” he told her with confidence.  “Just wait and see.”

They dropped anchor near the Main Street dock in order that they should be able to warp the schooner in to unload her cargo in the morning.  Tunis allowed shore leave, late as the hour was.  But he sat beside the passenger on the Seamew’s deck, and they talked.  It was surprising how much those two found to talk about!  Perhaps a good deal of their inconsequential chatter was to hide the anxiety each felt in secret as to the future.

However, that talk was a memorable one for both Tunis Latham and the girl posing as Ida May Bostwick.  Two young people can tell a great deal to each other under certain circumstances in the mid-watch of a starlit night.  The lap, lap of the wavelets whispering against the schooner’s hull, the drone of the surf on a distant bar, and the sounds of insect life from the shore were accompaniments to their long talk.

Orion Latham, tumbling over the forward rail from a waterside dinghy, whispered hoarsely in Johnny Lark’s ear: 

“What do you know about that?  There they are, billin’ and cooin’, just where we left ’em when we went ashore.  Wouldn’t it sicken you?”

But Johnny only grinned and chuckled, shaking the tiny gold rings in his ears till they sparkled in the faint light.  He had a girl himself in Portygee Town, at Big Wreck Cove.

The creaking of the hawsers and the “heave hos” of the crew as they warped the Seamew in to the wharf awoke the girl passenger in the cabin.  There was little fancy about the schooner’s after house, but it was comfortable.

There was a tarry smell about the place that rather pleased the girl.  The lamp over the round table vibrated in its gimbals, but did not swing.  There were several prints upon the walls of the cabin, prints which showed the rather exceptional taste of the Seamew’s master, for they had been tacked up since she had come into Tunis Latham’s possession.

There was, too, a somewhat faded photograph on a background of purple velvet, boxed in with glass, screwed to the forward stanchion.  It was the photograph of an overhealthy-looking young woman, with scallops of hair pasted to her forehead undoubtedly with quince-seed pomatum, her basque wrinkled across her bust because of the high-shouldered cut of it.  But it had been in the extreme mode when it was made and worn, in the eighties.

The brooch which fastened the lace collar had been painted yellow by the “artist photographer” of that day, and even the earrings she wore had been touched up, or perhaps painted on with the air brush.