he house, she shuddered at
his blasphemy, she felt the sting of the first blow he had given her,
she cowered as he roughly shook Mellony's little frame by her childish
arm.

"She'd better be dead!" she murmured. "I wish she was dead."

Captain Phippeny pulled himself together. "No, she hadn't,--no, you
don't, Mis' Pember," he declared stoutly. "You're making a mistake. You
don't want to see Mellony dead any more'n I do. She's only got married,
when all's said and done, and there's a sight of folks gets married and
none the worse for it. Ira Baldwin ain't any great shakes,--I dono as he
is; he's kinder light complected and soft spoken,--but he ain't a born
fool, and that's a good deal, Mis' Pember." He paused impressively, but
she did not speak. "And he ain't goin' to beat Mellony, either; he ain't
that sort. I guess Mellony could tackle him, if it came to that,
anyhow. I tell you, Mis' Pember, there's one thing you don't take no
reckonin' on,--there's a difference in husbands, there's a ter'ble
difference in 'em!" Mrs. Pember looked at him vaguely. Why did he go on
talking? Mellony was married. "Mellony's got one kind, and you--well,"
he went on, with cautious delicacy, "somehow you got another. I tell you
it's husbands as makes the difference to a woman when it comes to
marryin'."

Mrs. Pember stooped, picked up the note, turned and walked into the
living-room and sat down. She looked about her with that sense of
unreality that visits us at times. There was the chair in which Mellony
sat the night of her rebellious outbreak,--Mellony, her daughter, her
married daughter. Other women talked about their "married daughters"
easily enough, and she had pitied them; now she would have to talk so,
too. She felt unutterably lonely. Her household, like her hope, was
shattered. She looked up and saw that Captain Phippeny had followed her
in and was standing before her, turning his hat in his brown, tattooed
hands.

"Mis' Pember," he said, "I thought, mebbe, now Mellony was married,
you'd be thinkin' of matrimony yourself agen." As Mrs. Pember gazed at
him dumbly it seemed as if she must all at once have become another
person. Matrimony had suddenly become domesticated, as it were. Her eyes
travelled over the horseshoe charm and the long gold chain, as she
listened, and from pocket to pocket. "And so I wanted to say that I'd
like to have you think of me, if you was making out the papers for
another v'yage. The first mate I sa