r experience with Aunt Lucretia. Her present environment was so
far from the scenes of her old pain and misery that it seemed
nothing actually could disturb her again.

The peacefulness of the scene impressed Tunis as well. When they
came up finally upon the brink of the headland they saw a spiral of
smoke rising from one of the chimneys of the distant Ball homestead.
The man pointed to it and, smiling down upon her, repeated a verse
he had read somewhere which he knew expressed the hope she held:

"I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled
Above the green elms that a cottage was near;
And I said, 'if there's peace to be found in the world,
A heart that was humble might hope for it here.'"

"That is pretty near right, don't you think, Ida May?"

"It is, indeed! Oh, it is!" she cried. "And my heart _is_ humble,
Tunis. I feel that God has been very good to me--and you," she added
softly.

"I've been mighty good to myself," he responded. "Ida May, there
never was a girl just like you, I guess. Anyway, I never saw such a
one. I--I don't know just how to put it, but I feel that you are the
only girl in the world I can ever feel the same toward."

"Tunis!"

He took her hand, looking so hungrily into her face that she,
blushing, if not confused, could not bear his gaze, and the long
lashes drooped to veil the violet eyes.

"You understand me, Ida May?" whispered the captain of the _Seamew_
eagerly. "I don't know, fixed as I am, that I've any right to talk
to you like this. But--but I can't wait any longer!"

She allowed her hand to remain in his warm clasp, and now she looked
up at him again.

"Have you thought of what all this may mean, Tunis?" she asked.

"You bet I have. I haven't been thinking of much else--not since the
first time I saw you."

"What? You felt--felt that you could like me that night when we sat
on the bench so long on the Common?"

"My Godfrey, Ida May!" he exclaimed. "Since that time you slipped on
the sidewalk in front of that restaurant and I caught you. That's
when I first knew that you were the most wonderful girl in the
world!"

"Oh, Tunis! Do you mean that?"

"I certainly do," he said stoutly.

"That--that you thought _that_? At very first sight?"

"I couldn't get you out of my mind. I went about in a sort of dream.
Why, Ida May, when Cap'n Ira and Aunt Prue talked so much about
wanting that other girl down here, all I could think of was you! I