Thankful threw aside the carriage robe and prepared to clamber from the wagon.

“I surely am,” she declared.  “That’s what I came way over here for.”

The captain sprang to the ground and helped her to alight.

“I’ll be right across the road at the store there,” he said.  “I’ll be on the watch when you came out.  I—­I—­”

He hesitated.  Evidently there was something else he wished to say, but he found the saying difficult.  Thankful noticed the hesitation.

“Yes, what was it, Cap’n Bangs?” she asked.

Captain Obed fidgeted with the reins.

“Why, nothin’, I guess,” he faltered.  “Only—­only—­well, I tell you, Mrs. Barnes, if—­if you was figgerin’ on doin’ any business with Mr. Cobb, any money business, I mean, and—­and you’d rather go anywheres else I—­I—­well, I’m pretty well acquainted round here on the Cape amongst the bank folks and such and I’d be real glad to—­”

Thankful interrupted.  She had, after much misgiving and reluctance, made up her mind to approach her distant relative with the mortgage proposition, but to discuss that proposition with strangers was, to her mind, very different.  She had mentioned the proposed mortgage to Emily, but she had told no one else, not even the captain himself.  And she did not mean to tell.  The boarding house plan must stand or fall according to Mr. Cobb’s reception of it.

“No, no,” she said, hastily.  “It ain’t anything important—­that is, very important.”

“Well, all right.  You see—­I only meant—­excuse me, Mrs. Barnes.  I hope you don’t think I meant to be nosey or interferin’ in your affairs.”

“Of course I don’t.  You’ve gone to a lot of trouble on my account as ’tis, and you’ve been real kind.”

The captain hurriedly muttered that he hadn’t been kind at all and watched her as she walked up the short path to Mr. Cobb’s front door.  Then, with a solemn shake of the head, he clinched again at the wagon seat and drove across the road to the hitching-posts before the store.  Thankful opened the door of the “henhouse” and entered.

The interior of the little building was no mare inviting than its outside.  One room, dark, with a bare floor, and with cracked plastered walls upon which a few calendars and an ancient map were hanging.  There was a worn wooden settee and two wooden armchairs at the front, near the stove, and at the rear an old-fashioned walnut desk.

At this desk in a shabby, leather-cushioned armchair, sat a little old man with scant gray hair and a fringe of gray throat whiskers.  He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and over these he peered at his visitor.

“Good mornin’,” said Thankful.  It seemed to her high time that someone said something, and the little man had not opened his lips.  He did not open them even now.

“Um,” he grunted, and that was all.

“Are you Mr. Solomon Cobb?” she asked.  She knew now that he was; he had changed a great deal since she had last seen him, but his eyes had not changed, and he still had the habit she remembered, that of pulling at his whiskers in little, short tugs as if trying to pull them out.  “Like a man hauling wild carrots out of a turnip patch,” she wrote Emily when describing the interview.