usly, and wagging his bald head now and then as if a wasp stung
it.

Lufflin, who aboard ship would have risked a thousand lives on his own
cool judgment, had been uneasy and irritable for two months back, ever
since Mrs. Jacobus had written to him about buying this house for her.

"It was to be a Christmas gift from her to her husband," she wrote.
"She wanted it, therefore, kept a secret from him. Any quiet corner
along the coast which they could make into a home." Adding something
about M. Jacobus "being fagged out with work, and needing rest," at
which Lufflin shook his head. The Captain knew, that, bookworm and
picture-maniac though he might be, Jacobus had managed to squander, in
some unaccountable way, his own and his wife's fortune. So much of their
history had got back to the fishing-town where she had lived when a
child. People even hinted that they had been almost starving latterly in
New York. However that might be, Old Lufflin knew that the sum she
remitted to him was the last they had left; and beyond this, he had a
shrewd suspicion that in the shipwreck the Jacobuses had made of life,
something of more worth than money had been lost, and that this home she
talked of was most probably a last effort to bury some shameful secret.

The Captain, in his disgust at the unknown bookworm, fretted under the
whole affair. "It's not in my line," he would growl. "It's a cursed
bore. Poor Charlotte! she used to swim like a frog in the inlet there,
when she was only eleven. She's little heart for swimming now, it's
likely!" And would begin his search with re-doubled vigor.

This house, a gray stone cottage of five or six rooms, in the most
solitary part of the lee-coast, had been vacant for some time, and was
to be sold cheap. Lufflin bought and furnished it in his own name; and
then, as she directed, asked the Professor and his wife down to spend
the Christmas holidays with him. He was anxious and awkward as a
school-boy when they arrived the night before.

"It was too tough a job for you to set me, Charlotte," he grumbled. "How
was I to choose a home for a man that lives, they say, by the sight of
his eyes and the hearing of his ears? Water's water to me, and rocks
rocks,"--trotting after her as she went through the house in silence,
ending the survey with two or three sharp, decisive nods, and a quick,
pleased little laugh.

"Satisfied? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. We've had a good many houses, Jerome
and I; but this i