“Who suggested my coming to dinner, Tunis?  You, or your Aunt Lucretia?”

“If you knew my aunt!  Well!  She seldom says a word.  But when I have anything to say, I talk along just as though she answered back like an ordinary person would.  I can tell if she’s interested.”

“Yes?”

“She’s been interested in you from the start, I know.  She showed it in her look the very first time I spoke of you—­that day I brought you here to Wreckers’ Head.”

“But—­but you have never spoken of this before.  She did not come to call.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Tunis earnestly.  “I wanted to be sure.  Aunt ’Cretia knew your—­er—­Sarah Honey very well.”

“Oh.”

“Just about as well as Mrs. Ball did.  When she was staying here with Aunt Prue, she used to run over to our place a lot.

“You don’t remember it,” continued Tunis, grinning suddenly; “but you were taken over there when you were a baby.”

“Oh, don’t!  Don’t!” cried the girl.  “Let us not speak so lightly—­so carelessly.  Suppose—­suppose—­”

“Suppose nothing!” exclaimed Tunis.  “Don’t have any fears.  She wanted to know just how you looked—­every particular.  Oh, she has ways of showing what she wants without getting what you’d call voluble!  I told her about your hair—­your eyes—­everything.  I know from the way she looked that she accepts the fact of your being the real Ida May without more question than Cap’n Ira and Aunt Prue.”

She was silent, thinking.  Then she sighed.

“I will accept the invitation, Tunis.  But I feel—­I feel that all is not for the best.  But what must be must be.  So—­oh, I’ll go!”

CHAPTER XVI

MEMORIES—­AND TUNIS

The benison of that most beautiful season of all the year, the autumn, lay upon Wreckers’ Head and the adjacent coast on that Sunday morning.  Alongshore there is never any sad phase of the fall.  One reason is the lack of deciduous trees.  The brushless hills and fields are merely turned to golden brown when the frosts touch them.

The sea—­ever changing in aspect, yet changeless in tide and restraint—­was as bright and sparkling as at midsummer.  Along the distant beaches the white ruffle of the surf seemed to have just been laundered.  The green of the shallows and the blue of the deeper sea were equally vivid.

When she first arose Sheila Macklin looked abroad from that favorite north window of her bedroom, and saw that all the world was good.  If she had felt secret misgivings and the tremor of a nervous apprehension, these feelings were sloughed away by this promising morning.  The fear she had expressed to Tunis Latham the evening before did not obsess her.  She continued placid and outwardly cheerful.  Whatever threatened in the immediate future, she determined to meet it with as much composure as she could summon.

Nobody but Sheila Macklin knew wholly what she had endured since leaving her childhood’s home.  When Tunis Latham had come so dramatically into her life she had been almost at the limit of her endurance.  To him, even, she had not confessed all her miseries.  To escape from them she would have embraced a much more desperate expedient than posing as Ida May Bostwick.