“Why––does Miss Foster always? Is that her way? I––don’t––know––much about her.”
“Well, I don’t know so very much myself––mostly what my cousin tells me. Still, I guess she’s all right; but she strikes me as one of the kind that might make an awful lot of a man and never let on until she was dead sure of him.”
“H-m––That means she could think a whole lot of Withrow and not let on, Joe?”
I tried to look at Maurice like my oldest brother used to look at me sometimes when he tried to make me feel that I was a very green kid indeed, and said, “Well, if she’s the kind to care for a man like Withrow, all I’ve got to say is that she’ll deserve all she’ll get. He’s no good.”
“That may be, but how’s she to know? I know, you know, and half the men in Gloucester know that he’s rotten; but take a woman who only sees him at his best and when he’s watching out––how’s she to know?”
“I don’t know, but being a woman she ought to,” was all I could say to that. It came into my mind just then that when I next saw my cousin Nell I’d tell her what I really knew, and more than that––what I really thought of my old employer. Perhaps she’d carry it to Miss Foster. If it was to be Maurice or Withrow, I knew on which side I was going to be.
Both of us were quiet then, neither of us quite knowing what to say perhaps. Then together we 23 started to walk to the corner of the side street. We were past the side-door of the boarding-house when a voice called out, “Oh, Maurice,” and then, maybe noticing me, I suppose, “Oh, Captain Blake,” and Maurice turned. Minnie Arkell––Mrs. Miner rather––was there at the kitchen window. I didn’t know she was in town at all––thought she hadn’t got back from Florida, or North Carolina, or wherever it was she had been for the winter.
“Won’t you come in a minute, Captain, and your friend? He doesn’t remember me––do you, Joe?––and yet we were playmates once,” which was true. I was often taken to Mrs. Arkell’s when a little fellow by skippers who were friends of my father’s. They used to tell me about him, and I liked to listen.
“I thought I’d run over and see granny,” she went on. “I’m back to the old house for a while. Won’t you come in?”