"They will welcome you—gladly."
"Never! I am a stranger. They must be told all about me. They could never welcome Sheila Macklin."
He knew that. He knew it only too well. She was just the sort of girl to make Cap'n Ira Ball and Prudence happy, to bring to their latter years the comfort and joy the old couple should have. But the Puritanism which, after all, ingrained their characters would never allow the Balls to welcome a girl with the stain Sheila Macklin bore upon her name. Tunis remembered clearly how scornfully Cap'n Ira had spoken of the possibility of their taking in a girl from the poor farm. Pride of family and of name is inbred in their class of New Englanders.
The old people wanted a girl whom they could love and look upon as their own. They would welcome nobody else. They had set their minds and hearts upon Ida May Bostwick. The fact that Ida May failed to come up to their expectations, that she was perfectly worthless and inconsequential, did not open the way for another girl to be substituted for Ida May. Possibly Tunis might be successful in an attempt to interest the Balls in Sheila Macklin's case. But the girl did not want charity, not charity as the word is used in its general and harsher sense.
Should she carry with her wherever she went this name which had been so smirched—the identity of Sheila Macklin, the ghost of whose past misfortune might rise to shame her at any time—the girl could never be happy. Did Tunis Latham succeed in getting the Balls to take Sheila in and give her a home, this story that so bowed her down would continually threaten its revelation, like a pirate ship hovering in the offing!
And there was, too, a deeper reason why he could not introduce Sheila Macklin to Big Wreck Cove folk. It was no reason he could give the girl at this time. In some ways the captain of the Seamew was wise enough. He felt that this was no time to put forward his personal and particular desires. Enough that she had admitted him to her friendship and had given him her confidence.
She had accepted him in all good faith in a brotherly sense. He dared not spoil his influence with her by revealing a deeper interest.
"We may as well look at this thing calmly and sensibly," Tunis said, answering her statement of what was indubitably a fact. "It is quite true my old neighbors would not accept you as Sheila Macklin. But they need you; no other kind of a girl would so suit their need. And you could not help loving them; nor they you, once they learned to know you."
"I am sure I should love them," breathed Sheila.
"Then, as you are just the person they want and their home is just the place you need for shelter, I am going to take you back with me."