this boy and breakin’ your heart over the whitest man that ever stepped in shoe leather.  Doctor John’s lived a lie, tellin’ folks he wanted to devote himself to his hospital when he’d rather live in the sound o’ your voice and die a pauper than run a college anywhere else.  Lucy has lived a lie, and is livin’ it yet—­and likes it, too, that’s the worst of it.  And I been muzzled all these years; mad one minute and wantin’ to twist his neck, and the next with my eyes runnin’ tears that the only boy I got was lyin’ out among strangers.  The only one that’s honest is the little Pond Lily.  She ain’t got nothin’ to hide and you see it in her face.  Her father was square and her mother’s with her and nothin’ can’t touch her and don’t.  Let’s have this out.  I’m tired of it—­”

The captain was out of breath now, his emotions still controlling him, his astonishment at the unexpected opposition from the woman of all others on whose assistance he most relied unabated.

Jane rose from her chair and stood facing him, a great light in her eyes: 

“No!  No!  No!  A thousand times, no!  You don’t know Lucy; I do.  What you want done now should have been done when Archie was born.  It was my fault.  I couldn’t see her suffer.  I loved her too much.  I thought to save her, I didn’t care how.  It would have been better for her if she had faced her sin then and taken the consequences; better for all of us.  I didn’t think so then, and it has taken me years to find it out.  I began to be conscious of it first in her marriage, then when she kept on living her lie with her husband, and last when she deserted Ellen and went off to Beach Haven alone—­that broke my heart, and my mistake rose up before me, and I knew!”

The captain stared at her in astonishment.  He could hardly credit his ears.

“Yes, better, if she’d faced it.  She would have lived here then under my care, and she might have loved her child as I have done.  Now she has no tie, no care, no responsibility, no thought of anything but the pleasures of the moment.  I have tried to save her, and I have only helped to ruin her.”

“Make her settle down, then, and face the music! blurted out the captain, resuming his seat.  “Bart warn’t all bad; he was only young and foolish.  He’ll take care of her.  It ain’t never too late to begin to turn honest.  Bart wants to begin; make her begin, too.  He’s got money now to do it; and she kin live in South America same’s she kin here.  She’s got no home anywhere.  She don’t like it here, and never did; you kin see that from the way she swings ’round from place to place.  Make her face it, I tell ye.  You been too easy with her all your life; pull her down now and keep her nose p’inted close to the compass.”