“Did you, indeed?  I’m glad.”

“Yes, sir.  You used words in that sermon that I never heard afore in my life.  ’Twas grand.”

Lavinia confided to her pastor that Mr. Pratt made the best shoes in Ostable County.  He could fit any kind of feet, she declared, and the minister ought to try him sometime.  She added that he had money in the bank.

The Reverend John rode home in the stage beside Miss Annabel, not from choice, but because the young lady’s father insisted upon it.  Miss Daniels gushed and enthused as she always did.  As they drove by the Corners the minister, who had been replying absently to Annabel’s questions, suddenly stopped short in the middle of a sentence.  His companion, leaning forward to look out of the window, saw Grace Van Horne entering the store.  For an instant Annabel’s face wore a very unpleasant expression.  Then she smiled and said, in her sweetest manner: 

“Why, there’s the tavern girl!  I haven’t seen her for sometime.  How old she looks!  I suppose her uncle’s death has aged her.  Well, she’ll be married soon, just as soon as Cap’n Nat gets back.  They perfectly worship each other, those two.  They say she writes him the longest letters.  Hannah Poundberry told me.  Hannah’s a queer creature and common, but devoted to the Hammonds, Mr. Ellery.  However, you’re not interested in Come-Outers, are you?  Ha, ha!”

Ellery made some sort of an answer, but he could not have told what it was.  The sight of Grace had brought back all that he was trying so hard to forget.  Why couldn’t one forget, when it was so painful—­and so useless—­to remember?

Spring once more; then summer.  And now people were again speaking of Captain Nat Hammond.  His ship was overdue, long overdue.  Even in those days, when there were no cables and the telegraph was still something of a novelty, word of his arrival should have reached Trumet months before this.  But it had not come, and did not.  Before the summer was over, the wise heads of the retired skippers were shaking dubiously.  Something had happened to the Sea Mist, something serious.

As the weeks and months went by without news of the missing vessel, this belief became almost a certainty.  At the Come-Outer chapel, where Ezekiel Bassett now presided, prayers were offered for the son of their former leader.  These prayers were not as fervent as they might have been, for Grace’s nonattendance at meetings was causing much comment and a good deal of resentment.  She came occasionally, but not often.  “I always said she was stuck-up and thought she was too good for the rest of us,” remarked “Sukey B.” spitefully. “’And, between you and me, pa says he thinks Nat Hammond would be one to uphold her in it.  He wa’n’t a bit spirituous and never experienced religion.  If anything has happened to him, it’s a punishment sent, that’s what pa thinks.”