"I like to sew," said Jeanne.
"Well," confided the Captain, "I can't say as how I do."
Suddenly, wild shrieks rent the air. Sammy was jumping up and down in a patch of crimson clover. One grimy hand clasped a throbbing eyelid.
"Sammy smelled a bumby-bee," explained Annie, when Jeanne, dropping her pink calico, rushed to the rescue.
There were many other interruptions, happily not all so painful, before the new garments were finished; but, for many weeks, Jeanne's sewing traveled with her from end to end of the old dock; while she kept a watchful eye on her restless small charges.
"Father," asked Jeanne, one evening, when the pink dress was finished and Michael had received what the Captain called "a real pair of store pants," "aren't Michael and Sammy and Annie and Patsy your children, too?"
"Why, yes," replied Mr. Duval.
"Then why don't you take as much pains with them as you do with me? You never scold Michael for eating with his knife or for not being clean or for saying bad words. You didn't like it at all the day I said those bad words to Mollie's mother. You remember. The words I heard those men say when their boat ran into the dock. You said that ladies never said bad ones. Of course you couldn't make a lady out of Michael; but there's Annie. Why is it, Daddy?"
"Well," returned Mr. Duval, carefully shaved and very neat and tidy in his shabby clothes, "they are Mollie Shannon's children. You are the daughter of Elizabeth Huntington. Your full name is Jeannette Huntington Duval. I want you to live up to that name."
"Do you mean," asked Jeanne, who was perched on the old trunk, "that Mollie's children have to be like Mollie?"