a and Glasgow. Miss Osgood had met
him at the home of a friend of hers who had traveled on that steamer.

Hephzy and I do not agree as to whether or not he actually fell in love
with Ardelia Cahoon. Hephzy, of course, to whom Ardelia was the most
wonderfully beautiful creature on earth, is certain that he did--he
could not help it, she says. I am not so sure. It is very hard for me to
believe that Strickland Morley was ever in love with anyone but himself.
Captain Barnabas was well-to-do and had the reputation of being much
richer than he really was. And Ardelia WAS beautiful, there is no doubt
of that. At all events, Ardelia fell in love, with him, violently,
desperately, head over heels in love, the very moment the two were
introduced. They danced practically every dance together that evening,
met surreptitiously the next day and for five days thereafter, and
on the sixth day Captain Barnabas received a letter from his daughter
announcing that she and Morley were married and had gone to New York
together. "We will meet you there, Pa," wrote Ardelia. "I know you will
forgive me for marrying Strickland. He is the most wonderful man in the
wide world. You will love him, Pa, as I do."

There was very little love expressed by the Captain when he read the
note. According to Mr. Osgood's account, Barnabas's language was a
throwback from the days when he was first mate on a Liverpool packet.
That his idolized daughter had married without asking his consent
was bad enough; that she had married an Englishman was worse. Captain
Barnabas hated all Englishmen. A ship of his had been captured and
burned, in the war time, by the "Alabama," a British built privateer,
and the very mildest of the terms he applied to a "John Bull" will not
bear repetition in respectable society. He would not forgive Ardelia.
She and her "Cockney husband" might sail together to the most tropical
of tropics, or words to that effect.

But he did forgive her, of course. Likewise he forgave his son-in-law.
When the Captain returned to Bayport he brought the newly wedded pair
with him. I was not present at that homecoming. I was away at prep
school, digging at my examinations, trying hard to forget that I was
an orphan, but with the dull ache caused by my mother's death always
grinding at my heart. Many years ago she died, but the ache comes back
now, as I think of her. There is more self-reproach in it than
there used to be, more vain regrets for impatient