“Perhaps so,” assented Mrs. Davids, dubiously.  “But she is troubled a sight with the head complaint; I suppose you know she is.  That is against her.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Tame.  “The Muchmores all have weak heads.  And, too, the Widow Keens, she’s had a fall lately.  She was up in a chair cleaning her top buttery shelf, and somehow one of the chair-leg’s give way,—­it was loose or something, I expect,—­and down she went her whole heft.  She keeps about, but she goes with two staves.”

“I want to know if that is so,” said Captain Ben, his honest soul warming with sudden sympathy.  “The widder has seen a sight of trouble.”

“Yes, she has lived through a good deal, that woman has.  I couldn’t live through so much, ’pears to me; but we don’t know what we can live through,” rejoined Miss Tame.

Captain Ben did not reply, but his ready feet began to move to and fro restlessly; for his heart, more ready yet, had already gone out toward the unfortunate widow.

“It is so bad for a woman to be alone,” said he to himself, shambling along the shingly beach a moment after.  “Nobody to mend her chairs or split up her kindlings, or do a chore for her; and she lame into the bargain.  It is too bad.”

“He has steered straight for the Widow Keens’s, as sure as A is apple-dumpling,” remarked Miss Persis, peering after him from the window.

“Well, I must admit I wouldn’t have thought of Captain Ben’s being en-a-mored after such a sickly piece of business.  But men never know what they want.  Won’t you just hand me that gum-cam-phyer bottle, now you are up?  It is on that chest of drawers behind you.”

“No more they don’t,” returned Miss Tame, with a plaintive cadence, taking a sniff from the camphor-bottle on the way.  “However, I don’t begrutch him to her,—­I don’t know as I do.  It will make her a good hum, though, if she concludes to make arrangements.”

Meantime, Captain Ben Lundy’s head was wellnigh to Mrs. Keens’s door, for it was situated only around the first sand-hill.  She lived in a little bit of a house that looked as though it had been knocked together for a crockery-crate, in the first place, with two windows and a rude door thrown in as afterthoughts.  In the rear of this house was another tiny building, something like a grown-up hen-coop; and this was where Mrs. Keens carried on the business bequeathed to her by her deceased husband, along with five small children, and one not so small.  But, worse than that, one who was “not altogether there,” as the English say.

She was about this business now, dressed in a primitive sort of bloomer, with a wash-tub and clothes-ringer before her, and an army of bathing-suits of every kind and color flapping wildly in the fresh sea air at one side.

From a little farther on, mingling with the sound of the beating surf, came the merry voices of bathers,—­boarders at the great hotels on the hill.