Martha caught an inarticulate sound escaping from a figure muffled in a blanket shawl, but nothing else followed.

“I thought fust it was you when I heard that draggle-tail dog of yours barkin’, but it was only Miss Jane and Bart Holt.”

“Down on the beach!  When?” asked Martha.  She had not understood a word of Miss Gossaway’s outburst.

“Why, yesterday afternoon, of course—­didn’t I tell ye so?  I’d been down to Fogarty’s; it’s my week.  Miss Jane and Bart didn’t see me—­didn’t want to.  Might a’ been a pair of scissors, they was that close together.”

“Miss Jane warn’t on the beach yesterday afternoon,” said Martha in a positive tone, still in the dark.

“She warn’t, warn’t she?  Well, I guess I know Miss Jane Cobden.  She and Bart was hunched up that close you couldn’t get a bodkin ’tween ’em.  She had that red cloak around her and the hood up ever her head.  Not know her, and she within ten feet o’ me?  Well, I guess I got my eyes left, ain’t I?”

Martha stood stunned.  She knew now who it was.  She had taken the red cloak from Lucy’s shoulders the evening before.  Then a cold chill crept over her as she remembered the lie Lucy had told—­“not a soul on the beach but Meg and the sandsnipe.”  For an instant she stood without answering.  But for the window-sill on which her hand rested she would have betrayed her emotion in the swaying of her body.  She tried to collect her thoughts.  To deny Jane’s identity too positively would only make the situation worse.  If either one of the sisters were to be criticised Jane could stand it best.

“You got sharp eyes and ears, Ann Gossaway, nobody will deny you them, but still I don’t think Miss Jane was on the beach yesterday.”

“Don’t think, don’t you?  Maybe you think I can’t tell a cloak from a bed blanket, never havin’ made one, and maybe ye think I don’t know my own clo’es when I see ’em on folks.  I made that red cloak for Miss Jane two years ago, and I know every stitch in it.  Don’t you try and teach Ann Gossaway how to cut and baste or you’ll git worsted,” and the gossip looked over her spectacles at Martha and shook her side-curls in a threatening way.

Miss Gossaway had no love for the old nurse.  There had been a time when Martha “weren’t no better’n she oughter be, so everybody said,” when she came to the village, and the dressmaker never let a chance slip to humiliate the old woman.  Martha’s open denunciation of the dressmaker’s vinegar tongue had only increased the outspoken dislike each had for the other.  She saw now, to her delight, that the incident which had seemed to be only a bit of flotsam that had drifted to her shore and which but from Martha’s manner would have been forgotten by her the next day, might be a fragment detached from some floating family wreck.  Before she could press the matter to an explanation Martha turned abruptly on her heel, called Meg, and with the single remark, “Well, I guess Miss Jane’s of age,” walked quickly across the grass-plot and out of the gate, the ball and chain closing it behind her with a clang.