The girl looked deep into the young man’s eyes; nor did she free her hand from his clasp immediately.  At one side stood the two old people, both smiling, and not a little knowingly and slyly at each other, while the captain of the Seamew and the girl bade each other good night.  Cap’n Ira whispered in his wife’s ear: 

“Look at that now!  How long d’you think we’ll be able to keep Ida May with us?  I cal’late we’d better build our boundary fence a great sight higher and shut him out o’ walkin’ across this farm.”

But Prudence only struck at him with a gently admonitory hand.  Tunis and Ida May had taken down the remainder of the wash and the former carried it into the house before he started on for his own home.

The girl, walking behind the old couple into the homelike kitchen, sensed the warming hospitality of the place.  It was just as though she had known all this before, as though, in some past time, she had called the Ball homestead home.

“Lay off your hat and coat, Ida May, on the sitting-room lounge,” said Prudence.  “We’ll have supper before I show you upstairs.  Me and Ira sleep down here, but there’s a nice, big room up there I’ve fixed up for you.”

“Before you were sure I could come?” the girl asked in some wonder.

“She’s got faith enough to move mountains, Prudence has,” broke in Cap’n Ira proudly.  “At least, I cal’late she’s got enough to move this here Wreckers’ Head if she set out to.”  And he chuckled.

“But you believed Ida May would come, too.  You said so, Ira,” cried his wife.

“I swan!  I had to say it to keep up with you,” he returned.  “Otherwise you’d have sailed fathoms ahead of me.  However, if you hadn’t come, gal, neither of us could have well said to the other them bitterest of all human words:  ‘I told you so!’”

“How could you suppose I would not come?” asked the girl gayly.  “Who would refuse such a generous offer?”

“I knowed you’d see it that way,” said Prudence happily.

“But there might have been circumstances we could not foresee,” Cap’n Ira said.  “You—­you didn’t have many friends where you was stopping?”

“No real friends.”

“Well, there is a difference, I cal’late.  No young man, o’ course, like Tunis Latham, for instance?”

“Now, Ira!” admonished Prudence.

But Ida May only laughed.

“Nobody half as nice as Captain Latham,” she said with honesty.

“Well, I cal’late he would be hard to beat, even here on the Cape,” agreed the inquisitive old man.

He took a pinch of snuff and prepared to enjoy it.  Suddenly remembering his wife’s nervousness, he shouted in a high key: 

“Looker—­out—­Prue! A-choon!”

“Good—­Well, ye did warn me that time, Ira, for a fact.  But if I had a cake in the oven ’stead of biscuit, I guess ’twould have fell flat with that shock.  I do wish you could take snuff quiet.  Look an’ see, will you, Ida May, if those biscuits are burning?”