a man with a heart in him; he’s a sneak with a lie in his mouth.  Why don’t he come round like any of the others and say where he’s goin’ and what he wants to do instead of peepin’ round the gate-posts watchin’ for her and sendin’ her notes on the sly, and makin’ her lie to me, her old nurse, who’s done nothin’ but love her?  Doctor John don’t treat Miss Jane so—­he loves her like a man ought to love a woman and he ain’t got nothin’ to hide—­and you didn’t treat your wife so.  There’s something here that tells me”—­and she laid her hand on her bosom —­“tells me more’n I dare tell ye.  I warn ye now ag’in.  Send him to sea—­anywhere, before it is too late.  She ain’t got no mother; she won’t mind a word I say; Miss Jane is blind as a bat; out with him and now!”

The captain straightened himself up, and with his clenched fist raised above his head like a hammer about to strike, cried: 

“If he harmed the daughter of Morton Cobden I’d kill him!” The words jumped hot from his throat with a slight hissing sound, his eyes still aflame.

“Well, then, stop it before it gets too late.  I walk the floor nights and I’m scared to death every hour I live.”  Then her voice broke.  “Please, captain, please,” she added in a piteous tone.  “Don’t mind me if I talk wild, my heart is breakin’, and I can’t hold in no longer,” and she burst into a paroxysm of tears.

The captain leaned against the sideboard again and looked down upon the floor as if in deep thought.  Martha’s tears did not move him.  The tears of few women did.  He was only concerned in getting hold of some positive facts upon which he could base his judgment.

“Come, now,” he said in an authoritative voice, “let me get that chair and set down and then I’ll see what all this amounts to.  Sounds like a yarn of a horse-marine.”  As he spoke he crossed the room and, dragging a rocking-chair from its place beside the wall, settled himself in it.  Martha found a seat upon the sofa and turned her tear-stained face toward him.

“Now, what’s these young people been doin’ that makes ye so almighty narvous?” he continued, lying back in his chair and looking at her from under his bushy eyebrows, his fingers supporting his forehead.

“Everything.  Goes out sailin’ with her and goes driftin’ past with his head in her lap.  Fogarty’s man who brings fish to the house told me.”  She had regained something of her old composure now.

“Anything else?” The captain’s voice had a relieved, almost condescending tone in it.  He had taken his thumb and forefinger from his eyebrow now and sat drumming with his stiffened knuckles on the arm of the rocker.

“Yes, a heap more—­ain’t that enough along with the other things I’ve told ye?” Martha’s eyes were beginning to blaze again.

“No, that’s just as it ought to be.  Boys and girls will be boys and girls the world over.”  The tone of the captain’s voice indicated the condition of his mind.  He had at last arrived at a conclusion.  Martha’s head was muddled because of her inordinate and unnatural love for the child she had nursed.  She had found a spookship in a fog bank, that was all.  Jealousy might be at the bottom of it or a certain nervous fussiness.  Whatever it was it was too trivial for him to waste his time over.