th a reckless disregard for what
might arise through the plans they had made while sitting beside
each other on that bench on Boston Common.

He would not admit the point of his own risk. He would not consider
it when they had talked, only the night before, on the deck of the
schooner. He scouted every possibility of any harm coming to him
through their attempt to replace the girl in a firm niche in society
and give the Cap'n Ira Balls what they needed of companionship and
care.

The girl sat up in the berth and let her bare legs dangle a moment
before dropping to the rug. In her bare feet she padded to the
photograph of Captain Randall Latham's young wife.

The girl stood before the old photograph, her hands clasped, her
gaze raised to the pictured face, as a votary might stand before the
Madonna. There were tears in the girl's violet eyes. At that moment
she was uplifted, carried out of herself by the wealth of feeling in
her heart. Her lips moved.

"I promise," she said softly, "I promise you that I will never do
anything that will hurt him. I promise you that I will never let him
do anything that may harm him. He has given me my chance. I promise
before you and God that he shall not be sorry, ever, that he has
raised me out of the dust."

She stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to the glass which covered
the photograph.

The wind held fair, a quartering offshore blow, and the schooner,
having discharged her cargo, just past noon spread her upper sails,
caught a gentle breeze of old Boreas, and shot out of the harbor and
so to the southward with a following wind which brought her to the
mouth of Big Wreck Cove long before nightfall.

Upon the bluff of Wreckers' Head was to be dimly seen the sprawling
Ball homestead. Tunis pointed it out to the passenger.

"That is where you are going to be happy, Ida May," he said to her
softly.

"I wonder," murmured the girl.

He looked down into her rapt face. The violet eyes were fixed upon
the old house and the brown-and-green fields immediately surrounding
it. Perhaps Cap'n Ira and Prudence were out there now, watching from
the front yard the white-winged _Seamew_ threading so saucily the
crooked passage into the cove, the sand bars on one hand and the
serried teeth of the Lighthouse Point Reef on the other.

Inside the cove the schooner's canvas was reduced smartly to merely
a topsail and jib, the wind in which carried her close enough to
Luiz Wharf for a line