“I don’t believe it’s Nan’s fault,” Donald found himself saying next.  “She was always a good girl, and I can’t look at her now and conceive her as anything but virtuous and womanly.  I’ll always be a good friend of hers, Caleb.  I’ll stand back of her and see that she gets a square deal—­she and her son.  When you’re gone, she can leave Port Agnew for some city where she isn’t known, and as ‘Mrs. Brent’ she can engage in some self-supporting business.  It always struck me that Nan had a voice.”

“She has, Mr. Donald.  They had grand opera in Seattle, and I sent her up there to hear it and having a singing teacher hear her sing ’Alice, Where Art Thou.’  He said she’d be earning a thousand dollars a night in five years, Mr. Donald, if somebody in New York could train her.  That was the time,” he concluded, “that she met him! He was rich and, I suppose, full of fine graces; he promised her a career if she’d marry him, and so he dazzled the child—­she was only eighteen—­and she went to San Francisco with him.  She says there was some sort of marriage, but he gave her no such gift as I gave her mother—­a marriage certificate.  She wrote me she was happy, and asked me to forgive her the lack of confidence in not advising with me—­and of course I forgave her, Mr. Donald.  But in three months he left her, and one night the door yonder opened and Nan come in and put her arms round my neck and held me tight, with never a tear—­so I knew she’d cried her fill long since and was in trouble.”  He paused several seconds, then added, “Her mother was an admiral’s daughter—­and she married me!” He appeared to suggest this latter as a complete explanation of woman’s frailty.

“The world is small, but it is sufficiently large to hide a girl from the Sawdust Pile of Port Agnew.  Of course, Nan cannot leave you now, but when you leave her, Caleb, I’ll finance her for her career.  Please do not worry about it.”

“I’m like Nan, sir,” he murmured.  “I’m beyond tears, or I’d weep, Mr. Donald.  God will reward you, sir.  I can’t begin to thank you.”

“I’m glad of that.  By the way, who is towing the garbage-barge to sea nowadays?”

“I don’t know, sir.  Mr. Daney hired somebody else and his boat when I had to quit because of my sciatica.”

“Hereafter, we’ll use your boat, Caleb, and engage a man to operate it.  The rental will be ten dollars per trip, two trips a week, eighty dollars a month.  Cheap enough; so don’t think it’s charity.  Here’s the first month’s rental in advance.  I’m going to run along now, Caleb, but I’ll look in from time to time, and if you should need me in the interim, send for me.”

He kissed little Don Brent, who set up a prodigious shriek at the prospect of desertion and brought his mother fluttering into the room.  He watched her soothe the youngster and then asked: 

“Nan, where do you keep the arnica now?  I cut my knuckles on that yellow rascal.”