on you--to be the biggest trial of all. Well, that part's
about over, anyhow. No matter whether I can walk or not I shan't stay
and sponge on you. If I can't do anything else I'll hire a fish shanty
and open clams for a livin'."

He smiled again and she smiled in sympathy, but there were tears in her
eyes. She was seven years older than her brother, and he had always been
her pride. When she was a young woman, helping with the housework in the
old home there in Bayport, before her father's death and the sale of
that home, she had watched with immense gratification his success in
school. When he ran away to sea she had defended him when others
condemned. Later, when tales of his "smartness," as sailor or mate, or
by and by, a full rated captain, began to drift back, she had gloried in
them. He came to see her semi-occasionally when his ship was in port,
and his yarns of foreign lands and strange people were, to her, far more
wonderful than anything she had ever found in the few books which had
come in her way. Each present he brought her she had kept and cherished.
And there was never a trace of jealousy in her certain knowledge that he
had gone on growing while she had stopped, that he was a strong, capable
man of the world--the big world--whereas she was, and would always be,
the wife and household drudge of Joel Macomber.

Now, as she looked at him, pale, haggard and leaning on his cane,
stooping a little when he had been so erect and sturdy, the pity which
she had felt for him ever since they brought him into her sitting-room
on the day of the railway accident became keener than ever and with it
came an additional flash of insight. She realized more clearly than she
had before that it was not his bodily injuries which hurt most and were
the hardest to bear; it was his self-respect and the pride which were
wounded sorest. That he--_he_--Sears Kendrick, the independent autocrat
of the quarter deck, should be reduced to this! That it was wringing
his soul she knew. He had never complained except to her, and even to
her very, very seldom, but she knew. And she ventured to ask the
question she had wanted to ask ever since he had sufficiently recovered
to listen to conversation.

"Sears," she said "I haven't said a word before, and you needn't tell me
now if you don't want to--it isn't any of my business--but is it true
that you've lost a whole lot of money? It isn't true, is it?"

He had been standing by the open door