“There are twenty people almost within call who know me and who can swear to my name and my assertions that I am Miss Bostwick,” went on Sheila, with a calmness which both frightened and daunted the other.  “Just why you should come here and make such a preposterous claim I cannot understand.  Where do you come from?  Who are you—­really?”

Ida May stared, flaccid, helpless.  For the time being all her rage, her rudeness, her amazement, even, drained out of her.  For this impostor to face her down in this way; for her to claim Ida May’s name and identity with such utter calm—­such sangfroid; for Sheila to stand before her and deliberately declare that what Ida May had known to be her own all her life long—­her name and distinctive character—­was actually another’s—­all this was so monstrous a thing that Ida May was stunned.

Suppose—­suppose something had really happened to her mind?  People did go mad, Ida May had heard.  She had rather a vague idea as to what insanity was like, but she felt her mind slipping.

The sure and unafraid expression of the other girl’s countenance gave Ida May no help at all.  She was sure that her opponent had not lost her mind.  She was just a wicked, bad, horrid girl who had somehow got something that belonged to Ida May Bostwick, and meant to keep it if she could.

Self-pity filled the visitor’s mind in place of the fury she had expended in her first outburst.  She dared not attack the other with tooth and nail, for she saw now that this girl was as much her superior in physical strength as she was in strength of character.

Therefore, Ida May fell back upon tears.  She blubbered right heartily, and, being really weary after her walk from the port, she fell back into the spring rocker, which squeaked almost as protestingly as she did, put her beringed hands before her face, and gave herself to grief.

Sheila Macklin’s expression did not change.  She revealed no sympathy for Ida May Bostwick.  If she felt sympathy, it was for that girl who had been persecuted, unfairly accused of stealing, sent to a place worse than prison, afterward branded with the stigma of “jailbird”; that girl whom Tunis Latham had befriended, had rescued from a situation which she could not think of now without a feeling of creeping horror.

Was she going to give over without a fight to this new claimant a place which had been and still was her only refuge?  It could not be expected that she would do this.  She had had no warning of this catastrophe.  There had been no opportunity to prepare for a situation which must have shocked her terribly in any case.  But if she had only had time—­

Time?  Time for what?  To run away?  Or to prepare the Balls, for instance, for the coming of this new claimant?  And who knew this girl who said she was Ida May Bostwick?  Sheila Macklin was fully aware of the history of Sarah Honey, of her marriage which had quite cut her off from her Cape Cod friends, and of the little that was known at Big Wreck Cove about her daughter, who, since babyhood, had never been seen here.