ord and I'll do it, anyway. Serena, I'll 'tend to her.
You're tired out; lie down and rest."

"But, Daniel--"

"Lie down and rest. I'm runnin' this craft. Well," wheeling upon his
daughter, "are you goin'? Or shall I carry you?"

Gertrude looked at him and then at her mother. Her lips twitched.

"I'll go, Daddy," she said meekly, and went.

When Captain Dan descended to the lower floor he found Mr. Ginn in the
library.

"Hello!" hailed the latter, "you look kind of set-up and sassy, seems to
me. YOU ain't had nothin' to drink, have you?"

"Drink? What do you mean by that? Has anybody around here had anything
to drink?"

"I don't know. Some of 'em act as if they had. When I came into the
kitchen a spell ago I found my wife and Gertie dancin' like a couple of
loons."

"Dancin'?"

"Yes, sir, holdin' hands and hoppin' around like sand fleas in a clam
bake. I asked 'em what set 'em goin' and they wouldn't tell me. I
couldn't think of anything but liquor that would start Zuby Jane
dancin'. I don't know's that would--I never tried it on her--but 'twas
the only likely guess I could make."

CHAPTER XV

Captain Dan was seated in his old chair, at his old desk, behind the
counter of the Metropolitan Store. His pipe, the worn, charred briar
that he had left in the drawer of that very desk when he started for the
railway station and Scarford, was in his mouth. Over the counter, beyond
the showcases and the tables with their piles of oilskins, mittens,
sou'westers, and sweaters, through the panes of the big front windows,
he could see the road, the main street of Trumet. The road was muddy,
and the mud had frozen. Beyond the road, between the shops and houses on
the opposite side, he saw the bare brown hills, the pond where the city
people found waterlilies in the summer--the pond was now a glare of
ice--the sand dunes, the beach, the closed and shuttered hotel and
cottages, and, beyond these, the cold gray and white of the wintry sea
rolling beneath a gloomy sky. To the average person the view would have
been desolation itself. To Captain Dan it was a section of Paradise. It
was the picture which had been in his mind for months. And here it was
in reality, unchanged, unspoiled, a part of home, his home. And he, at
last, was at home again.

They had been in Trumet a week, the captain and Serena and Gertrude.
Azuba had been there two days longer, having been sent on ahead of the
family to open the house and get