“I didn’t see a great deal of what was going on, being too busy with my fishweirs and clamming to notice.  Allie and me wa’n’t exactly David and Jonathan, owing, I judge, to our informal introduction to each other.  But I used to see him scooting ’round in his launch—­twenty-five foot, she was, with a little mahogany cabin and the land knows what—­and the servants at the big house told me yarns about his owning a big steam-yacht, with a sailing-master and crew, which was cruising round Newport somewheres.

“But, busy as I was, I see enough to make me worried.  There was a good deal of whispering over the Saunders back gate after supper, and once, when I come up over the bluff from the shore sudden, they was sitting together on a rock and he had his arm round her waist.  I dropped a hint to Phoebe Ann, but she shut me up quicker’n a snap-hinge match-box.  Allie had charmed ‘auntie’ all right.  And so it drifted along till September.

“One Monday evening about the middle of the month I went over to Phoebe Ann’s to borrow some matches.  Barbara wasn’t in—­gone out to lock up the hens, or some such fool excuse.  But Phoebe was busting full of joy.  Cap’n Eben had arrived in New York a good deal sooner’n was expected and would be home on Thursday morning.

“’He’s going from Boston to Provincetown on the steamer, Wednesday,’ says Phoebe.  ’He’s got some business over there.  Then he’s coming home from Provincetown on the early train.  Ain’t that splendid?’

“I thought ’twas splendid for more reasons than one, and I went out feeling good.  But as I come round the corner of the house there was somebody by the back gate, and I heard a girl’s voice sayin’:  ‘Oh, no, no!  I can’t!  I can’t!’

“If I hadn’t trod on a stick maybe I’d have heard more, but the racket broke up the party.  Barbara come hurrying past me into the house, and by the light from the back door, I see her face.  ’Twas white as a clam-shell, and she looked frightened to death.

“Thinks I:  ’That’s funny!  It’s a providence Eben’s coming home so soon.’

“And the next day I saw her again, and she was just as white and wouldn’t look me in the eye.  Wednesday, though, I felt better, for the servants on the Davidson place told me that Allie had gone to Boston on the morning train to be gone for good, and that they was going to shut up the house and haul up the launch in a day or so.

“Early that afternoon, as I was coming from my shanty to the bluff on my way to the shore after dinner, I noticed a steam-yacht at anchor two mile or so off the bar.  She must have come there sence I got in, and I wondered whose she was.  Then I see a dingey with three men aboard rowing in, and I walked down the beach to meet ’em.

“Sometimes I think there is such things as what old Parson Danvers used to call ‘dispensations.’  This was one of ’em.  There was a feller in a uniform cap steering the dingey, and, b’lieve it or not, I’ll be everlastingly keelhauled if he didn’t turn out to be Ben Henry, who was second mate with me on the old Seafoam.  He was surprised enough to see me, and glad, too, but he looked sort of worried.