“Look here, captain,” continued Miss Port, “can’t you come and take dinner with us?  You haven’t seen Pop for ever so long.  It won’t be lunch, though, but an honest dinner.”

The captain accepted the invitation; for old Mr. Port was one of his ancient friends; and then he entered the store.  Miss Port was on the point of following him; she had something to say about Olive; but she stopped.

“I’ll keep that till dinner-time,” she said to herself.

Old Mr. Port had always been a very pleasant man to visit, and he had not changed now, although he was nearly eighty years old.  He had been a successful merchant in the days when Captain Asher commanded a ship, and there was good reason to believe that a large measure of his success was due to his constant desire to make himself agreeable to the people with whom he came in business contact.  He was just as agreeable to his friends, of whom Captain Asher was one of the oldest.

The people of Glenford often puzzled themselves as to what sort of a woman Maria’s mother could have been.  None of them had ever seen her, for she had died years before old Mr. Port had come into that healthful region to reside; but all agreed that her parents must have been a strangely assorted pair, unless, indeed, as some of the wiser suggested, she got her disposition from a grandparent.

“That navy niece of yours must be a wild girl,” said Miss Port to the captain as she carved the beef.

“Wild!” exclaimed the captain.  “I never saw anything wild about her.”

“Perhaps not,” said his hostess, “but there’s others that have.  It was only three days ago that she took that young man, that goggle-eyed one, out on the river in a boat, and did her best to upset him.  Whether she stood up and made the boat rock while he clung to the side, or whether she bumped the boat against rocks and sand-bars, laughin’ the louder the more he was frightened, I wasn’t told.  But she did skeer him awful.  I know that.”

“You seem to know a good deal about what is going on at Broadstone,” remarked the captain, somewhat sarcastically.

“Indeed I do,” said she; “a good deal more than they think.  They’ve got such fine stomachs that they can’t eat the beef they get at the gap, and Mr. Morris goes there three times a week, all the way from Glenford, to take them Chicago beef.  The rest of the time they mostly eat chickens, I’m told.”

“And so your butcher takes meat and brings back news,” said the captain.  “The next time he passes the toll-gate I will tell him to leave the news with me, and I will see that it is properly distributed.”  And with this, he began to talk with Mr. Port.

“Oh, you needn’t be so snappish about her,” insisted Maria.  “If you are in that temper often, I don’t wonder the young woman wanted to go away.”

The captain made no answer, but his glance at the speaker was not altogether a pleasant one.  Old Mr. Port did not hear very well; but his eyesight was good, and he perceived from the captain’s expression that his daughter had been saying something sharp.  This he never allowed at his table; and, turning to her, he said gently, but firmly: