"Do you think I'm that kind of a fellow?" he demanded bluntly.
"I—I told you I thought I had quite read your character in your face. But that is no reason why I should take advantage of your kindness to do you harm."
"Harm? How do you mean, 'harm?'"
"Sheila Macklin is a creature from a reformatory. She has been sentenced by a magistrate. She was arrested by the police. She was accused by her employers of theft, and the theft was proved. If any of your friends should see you with me, and I should be identified as the Sheila Macklin who was sentenced for stealing—"
"Cat's foot!" ejaculated Tunis with a sudden reversion to his usual cheerful manner. "Are you going through the rest of your life feeling like that?"
"Why shouldn't I? I am always expecting somebody to see and recognize me. Even in Sellers' place. That man this evening, when he called me 'jailbird'—"
"I wish I had wrung his neck!" exclaimed the captain of the Seamew heartily.
"I appreciate your kindness." Her eyes twinkled. For a moment he caught a glimpse of what Sheila Macklin must have been before tragedy had come into her life. "You are a good, kind man, Captain Latham."
"You just look on me as though I were your brother," he said sturdily. "You are not going to be alone any more, not really. If you had had friends before, when it happened, somebody to speak for you, I am sure nothing like what did happen to you could have happened."
"I come of respectable people," she said quietly. "But they are all dead. I was an orphan before I came to Boston. The friends I had in the little inland town I came from would not have understood. They did not approve of my coming to the city at all. Oh, I wish I had not come!"