“There must be,” answered Julia:  “my father hasn’t been to sea for a good many years. My father,” she added, with a diffidence indescribably mingled with a sense of distinction,—­“my father ’s in State’s Prison.  What kind of looking man was this?”

The contributor mechanically described him.

Julia Tinker broke into a loud, hoarse laugh.  “Yes, it’s him, sure enough.”  And then, as if the joke were too good to keep:  “Mis’ Hapford, Mis’ Hapford, father’s got out.  Do come here!” she called into a back room.

When Mrs. Hapford appeared, Julia fell back, and, having deftly caught a fly on the doorpost, occupied herself in plucking it to pieces, while she listened to the conversation of the others.

“It’s all true enough,” said Mrs. Hapford, when the writer had recounted the moving story of Jonathan Tinker, “so far as the death of his wife and baby goes.  But he hasn’t been to sea for a good many years, and he must have just come out of State’s Prison, where he was put for bigamy.  There’s always two sides to a story, you know; but they say it broke his first wife’s heart, and she died.  His friends don’t want him to find his children, and this girl especially.”

“He’s found his children in the city,” said the contributor gloomily, being at a loss what to do or say, in view of the wreck of his romance.

“Oh, he’s found ’em, has he?” cried Julia, with heightened amusement.  “Then he’ll have me next, if I don’t pack and go.”

“I’m very, very sorry,” said the contributor, secretly resolved never to do another good deed, no matter how temptingly the opportunity presented itself.  “But you may depend he won’t find out from me where you are.  Of course I had no earthly reason for supposing his story was not true.”

“Of course,” said kind-hearted Mrs. Hapford, mingling a drop of honey with the gall in the contributor’s soul, “you only did your duty.”

And indeed, as he turned away, he did not feel altogether without compensation.  However Jonathan Tinker had fallen in his esteem as a man, he had even risen as literature.  The episode which had appeared so perfect in its pathetic phases did not seem less finished as a farce; and this person, to whom all things of every-day life presented themselves in periods more or less rounded, and capable of use as facts or illustrations, could not but rejoice in these new incidents, as dramatically fashioned as the rest.  It occurred to him that, wrought into a story, even better use might be made of the facts now than before, for they had developed questions of character and of human nature which could not fail to interest.  The more he pondered upon his acquaintance with Jonathan Tinker, the more fascinating the erring mariner became, in his complex truth and falsehood, his delicately blended shades of artifice and naivete.  He must, it was felt, have believed to a certain point in his own inventions:  nay, starting with that groundwork