The Cap’n was now congratulating himself that he hadn’t blurted out anything about the bridge director and that sapling fence.  It certainly was a grateful sound—­that praise from the pretty lady!  He didn’t want to interrupt it.

“Now will you go on with that story of the storm?” she begged, hitching the chair a bit nearer.  “I want to hear about your adventures.”

She had all the instincts of Desdemona, did that pretty little lady.  Three times that week she came to the toll-house and listened with lips apart and eyes shining.  Cap’n Sproul had never heard of Othello and his wooing, but after a time his heart began to glow under the reverent regard she bent on him.  Never did mutual selection more naturally come about.  She loved him for the perils he had braved, and he—­robbed of his mistress, the sea—­yearned for just such companionship as she was giving him.  He had known that life lacked something.  This was it.

And when one day, after a stuttering preamble that lasted a full half hour, he finally blurted out his heart-hankering, she wept a little while on his shoulder—­it being luckily a time when there was no one passing—­and then sobbingly declared it could never be.

“’Fraid of your brother, hey?” he inquired.

She bumped her forehead gently on his shoulder in nod of assent.

“I reckon ye like me?”

“Oh, Aaron!” It was a volume of rebuke, appeal, and affection in two words.

“Then there ain’t nothin’ more to say, little woman.  You ain’t never had any one to look out for your int’rests in this life.  After this, it’s me that does it.  I don’t want your money.  I’ve got plenty of my own.  But your interests bein’ my interests after this, you hand ev’rything over to me, and I’ll put a twist in the tail of that Bengal tiger in your fam’ly that ’ll last him all his life.”

At the end of a long talk he sent her away with a pat on her shoulder and a cheery word in her ear.

It was Old Man Jordan who, a week or so later, on his way to the village with butter in his bucket, stood in the middle of the road and tossed his arms so frenziedly that Colonel Ward, gathering up his speed behind the willows, pulled up with an oath.

“Ye’re jest gittin’ back from up-country, ain’t ye?” asked Uncle Jordan.

“What do you mean, you old fool, by stoppin’ me when I’m busy?  What be ye, gittin’ items for newspapers?”

“No, Kun’l Ward, but I’ve got some news that I thought ye might like to hear before ye went past the toll-house this time.  Intentions between Cap’n Aaron Sproul and Miss Jane Ward has been published.”

“Wha-a-at!”

“They were married yistiddy.”

“Wha—­” The cry broke into inarticulateness.

“The Cap’n ain’t goin’ to be toll-man after to-day.  Says he’s goin’ to live on the home place with his wife.  There!” Uncle Jordan stepped to one side just in time, for the gaunt horse sprung under the lash as though he had the wings of Pegasus.