Captain Obed was delighted.  “Shake, John,” he exclaimed.  “I’m tickled to death.  And I’ll tell you this:  If you can’t get a client no other way I’ll—­I’ll break into the meetin’-house and steal a pew or somethin’.  Then you can defend me.  Eh . . .  And now what about a place for you to eat and sleep?” he added, after a moment.

The young man seemed to find the question as hard to answer as the other.

“I like it here,” he admitted.  “I like it very much indeed.  But I must economize and the few hundred dollars I have scraped together won’t—­”

He was interrupted.  Emily Howes appeared at the corner of the house behind them.

“Supper is ready,” she called cheerfully.

Both men turned to look at her.  She was bareheaded and the western sun made her profile a dainty silhouette, a silhouette framed in the spun gold of her hair.

“John’s comin’, Miss Emily,” answered the captain.  “He’ll be right there.”

Emily waved her hand and hurried back to the dining-room door.  Mr. Kendrick kicked the stone into the grass.

“I think I may as well remain here, for the present at least,” he said.  “After all, there is such a thing as being too economical.  A chap can’t always make a martyr of himself, even if he knows he should.”

The next morning Mrs. Barnes, over at the village on a marketing expedition, met Captain Bangs on his way to the postoffice.

“Oh, Cap’n,” she said, “I’ve got somethin’ to tell you.  ’Tain’t bad news this time; it’s good.  Mr. Heman Daniels has changed his mind.  He’s goin’ to keep his room and board with me just as he’s been doin’.  Isn’t that splendid!”

The sewing circles and the club and the noon and evening groups at the postoffice had two new subjects for verbal dissection during the next fortnight.  This was, in its way, a sort of special Providence, for this was the dull season, when there were no more wrecks alongshore or schooners aground on the bars, and the boarders and cottagers from the cities had not yet come to East Wellmouth.  Also the opening of the High Cliff House was getting to be a worn-out topic.  So Emily Howes, her appearance and behavior, and John Kendrick, his behavior and his astonishing recklessness in attempting to wrest a portion of the county law practice from Heman Daniels, were welcomed as dispensations and discussed with gusto.

Emily came through the gossip mill ground fine, but with surprisingly little chaff.  She was “pretty as a picture,” all the males agreed upon that point.  And even the females admitted that she was “kind of good-lookin’,” although Hannah Parker’s diagnosis that she was “declined to be consumptic” and Mrs. Larkin’s that she was older than she “made out to be,” had some adherents.  All agreed, however, that she knew how to run a boarding-house and that she was destined to be the “salvation” of Thankful Barnes’ venture at the Cap’n Abner place.