“And how?  With one shirt and a lot of bad sailor habits.”

“My one shirt is my only very bad habit,” said Richard, with a laugh,—­he could laugh now,—­“and I mean to get rid of that.”

Mr. Shackford snapped his fingers disdainfully.

“You ought to have stuck to the sea; that’s respectable.  In ten years you might have risen to be master of a bark; that would have been honorable.  You might have gone down in a gale,—­you probably would,—­and that would have been fortunate.  But a stone-cutter!  You can understand,” growled Mr. Shackford, reaching out for his straw hat, which he put on and crushed over his brows, “I don’t keep a boarding-house for Slocum’s hands.”

“Oh, I’m far from asking it!” cried Richard.  “I am thankful for the two nights’ shelter I have had.”

“That’s some of your sarcasm, I suppose,” said Mr. Shackford, half turning, with his hands on the door-knob.

“No, it is some of my sincerity.  I am really obliged to you.  You weren’t very cordial, to be sure, but I did not deserve cordiality.”

“You have figured that out correctly.”

“I want to begin over again, you see, and start fair.”

“Then begin by dropping Slocum.”

“You have not given me a chance to tell you what the arrangement is.  However, it’s irrevocable.”

“I don’t want to hear.  I don’t care a curse, so long as it is an arrangement,” and Mr. Shackford hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Then Richard, quite undisturbed by his cousin’s unreasonableness, sat himself down to eat the last meal he was ever to eat under that roof,—­a feat which his cousin’s appetite had rendered comparatively easy.

While engaged in this, Richard resolved in his mind several questions as to his future abode.  He could not reconcile his thought to any of the workingmen’s boarding-houses, of which there were five or six in the slums of the village, where the doorways were greasy, and women flitted about in the hottest weather with thick woolen shawls over their heads.  Yet his finances did not permit him to aspire to lodgings much more decent.  If he could only secure a small room somewhere in a quiet neighborhood.  Possibly Mrs. Durgin would let him have a chamber in her cottage.  He was beginning life over again, and it struck him as nearly an ideal plan to begin it on the identical spot where he had, in a manner, made his first start.  Besides, there was William Durgin for company, when the long nights of the New England winter set in.  The idea smiled so pleasantly in Richard’s fancy that he pushed the plate away from him impatiently, and picked up his hat which lay on the floor beside the chair.

That evening he moved from the Shackford house to Mrs. Durgin’s cottage in Cross Street.  It was not an imposing ceremony.  With a small brown-paper parcel under his arm, he walked from one threshold to the other, and the thing was done.