" "When the thin one has sucked the life
out of you," he would say with a laugh, "she passes you on to her old
mother, who sits doubled up inside the web, and when she gets done
munching there isn't anything left but your hide and bones."

It was but one of Uncle Ephraim's jokes. The mother was only a forlorn,
half-alive old woman who dozed in her chair by the hour--the relict of
a fisherman who had gone to sea in his yawl some twenty years before
and who had never come back. The daughter, with the courage of youth,
had then stepped into the gap and had alone made the fight for bread.
Gradually, as the years went by the roses in her cheeks--never too
fresh at any time--had begun to fade, her face and figure to shrink,
and her brow to tighten. At last, embittered by her responsibilities
and disappointments, she had lost faith in human kind and had become a
shrew. Since then her tongue had swept on as relentlessly as a scythe,
sparing neither flower nor noxious weed, a movement which it was wise,
sometimes, to check.

When, therefore, Martha, with Meg now bounding before her, caught sight
of Ann Gossaway's beckoning hand thrust out of the low window of her
cottage--the spider-web referred to by Uncle Ephraim--she halted in her
walk, lingered a moment as if undecided, expressed her opinion of the
dressmaker to Meg in an undertone, and swinging open the gate with its
ball and chain, made her way over the grass-plot and stood outside the
window, level with the sill.

"Well, it ain't none of my business, of course, Martha Sands," Miss
Gossaway began, "and that's just what I said to mother when I come
home, but if I was some folks I'd see my company in my parlor, long as
I had one, 'stead of hidin' down behind the House o' Refuge. I said to
mother soon's I got in, 'I'm goin' to tell Martha Sands fust minute I
see her. She ain't got no idee how them girls of hers is carryin' on or
she'd stop it.' That's what I said, didn't I, mother?"

Martha caught an inarticulate sound escaping from a figure muffled in a
blanket shawl, but nothing else followed.

"I thought fust it was you when I heard that draggle-tail dog of yours
barkin', but it was only Miss Jane and Bart Holt."

"Down on the beach! When?" asked Martha. She had not understood a word
of Miss Gossaway's outburst.

"Why, yesterday afternoon, of course--didn't I tell ye so? I'd been
down to Fogarty's; it's my week. Miss Jane and Bart didn't see
me--didn't want to. Mig