“I should like to go rowing with her every day,” he had remarked confidentially.  “Each time I started I should make a new will.”

“Why a new one?” Mrs. Easterfield had asked.

“Each time I should take something more from my relatives to give to her,” had been the answer.

As she sat and thought, Mrs. Easterfield began to be a little frightened.  She was a brave woman, but it is the truly brave who know when they should be frightened, and she felt her responsibility, not on account of the niece of the toll-gate keeper, but on account of the daughter of Lieutenant Asher, whom she had once known so well.  The thing which frightened her was the possibility that before anybody would be likely to think of such a thing Olive might marry Claude Locker.  He was always ready to do anything he wanted to do at any time; and for all Mrs. Easterfield knew, the girl might be of the same sort.

But Mrs. Easterfield rose to the occasion.  She looked upon Olive as a wild young colt who had broken out of her paddock, but she remembered that she herself had a record for speed.  “If there is to be any running I shall get ahead of her,” she said to herself, “and I will turn her back.  I think I can trust myself for that.”

Olive slept the sound sleep of the young, but for all that she had a dream.  She dreamed of a kind, good, thoughtful, and even affectionate, middle-aged man; a man who looked as though he might have been her father, and whom she was beginning to look upon as a father, notwithstanding the fact that she had a real father dressed in a uniform and on a far-away ship.  She dreamed ever so many things about this newer, although elder, father, and her dream made her very happy.

But in the morning when she woke her dream had entirely passed from her mind, and she felt just as much like a colt as when she had gone to bed.

CHAPTER VII

The Captain and his Guest go Fishing and come Home Happy.

When Dick Lancaster told Captain Asher he had taken toll from two ladies in a phaeton he was quite eloquent in his description of said ladies.  He declared with an impressiveness which the captain had not noticed in him before that he did not know when he had seen such handsome ladies.  The younger one, who paid the toll, was absolutely charming.  She seemed a little bit startled, but he supposed that was because she saw a strange face at the toll-gate.  Dick wanted very much to know who these ladies were.  He had not supposed that he would find such stylish people, and such a handsome turnout in this part of the country.

“Oh, ho,” said Captain Asher, “do you suppose we are all farmers and toll-gate keepers?  If you do, you are very much mistaken, although I must admit that the stylish people, as you call them, are scattered about very thinly.  I expect that carriage was from Broadstone over on the mountain.  Was the team dapple gray, pony built?”