Mother Joyce looked at Dorothy, who responded promptly.
“I’ll be glad to do so, of course,” she answered.
“All right, Joe. We’ll come.” Then, as the sailor’s footsteps died away, the old lady turned to Dorothy. “My dear,” she essayed diffidently. “It’s cautioning you a bit I must be. It’s a bad state of things for a pretty young woman like yourself we’re after having here, so it is. Will you be goin’ to marry that young man who saved your life and who’s been so kind to you ever since the wreck?”
Dorothy sat up very straight, and her cheeks flamed.
“Indeed, I am not,” she exclaimed.
Mother Joyce looked more troubled than ever. “It’s not for idle curiosity I’m asking,” she continued, “but because—— Are you quite certain you don’t want to marry him? It’s good and true he looks and—maybe it’s not another chance you’ll be getting.”
Dorothy’s cheeks still burned, but uneasiness tugged at her heart-strings. Clearly there was something behind the old woman’s words—something of grave import, too. Joe and Bill had also hinted something she did not quite understand.
“Marriage between me and Mr. Howard is entirely out of the question,” she replied quietly. “There are reasons that I can’t go into now. But I wish you would tell me exactly what the trouble is, dear Mother Joyce; for I am sure there is something dreadfully wrong.”
Mother Joyce studied the girl for a moment.
“Faith and I will,” she acquiesced. “Maybe it’s all right it is—if you’re certain you don’t want to marry that young man of yours. The trouble is the plentiful lack of females we have here in the sea. You haven’t seen Prudence Gallegher yet. She’s the one other woman here. She drifted in alone and half crazy on the ship Swan two years ago. Her husband and everybody else had been drowned. In the two years she’s been here she’s been married four times.”