"Where is this place she works at?" asked the captain of the Seamew, with a suppressed sigh.
"Guess you are a stranger in town, aren't you?" said the curious landlady. "I thought everybody knew Hoskin & Marl's. It's on Tremont Street. The big department store."
"Oh! Miss Bostwick works there?"
"In the laces. You can't know her very well, young man."
"I come from her folks down on the Cape," he thought it his duty to explain. "I've a message for her."
"On the Cape? My stars! I never knowed she had any country relatives. Are they rich? They ain't died and left her a fortune, have they?" were the eager questions.
"The ones I speak of are still alive," Tunis said gravely, backing up the steps to the sidewalk. "Thank you, ma'am. I'll go to that store and speak to her there. Thank you."
Before she could evolve another question, Tunis had escaped. He walked smartly away, not only to outdistance the lodging-house keeper's voice, but because he was confused and disappointed. Ida May Bostwick could not work in a department store and in an eating house as well. Of course not! And now that this point was an established fact in his mind, he admitted that he had been utterly foolish to imagine for a moment that he had already met her, that she was the violet-eyed girl in whom he had taken an interest.
Right at the start he had known that a girl working in an eating house like that was not the sort of person he could introduce to Aunt Lucretia. And so why had he imagined that she would prove to be the great-niece of Prudence Ball? It was ridiculous!
Of course, this Ida May came of good Cape stock. At least, on one side of her family. The Honeys were as good as the Lathams or the Balls.