his wife immediately placed the meat on the frying pan, and the odor of
steak quickly filled every cranny of the small cabin of three rooms.

The two little girls were slow to make up with Darry, but he knew how to
interest them in certain ways, and it was not long before they hovered
around him as if he were a curiosity indeed.

Abner tried to make himself as agreeable as possible, for various
reasons.

He saw that his wife had not yet become reconciled to the fact of a
stranger coming among them, and was watching Darry out of the corners of
her eyes from time to time, while a frown would gather on her brow.

She was a sharp-featured woman; but life goes hard with those of her sex
in this coast country, and they grow old at forty.

Darry was studying hard how to please her, for he felt that she was to
be pitied after having lost her only boy so suddenly a year or so back;
and he determined never to forget this if she should scold him
needlessly or show temper.

He anticipated her wants in the line of wood for the fire, cheerfully
assisted in washing up the supper dishes, and was withal so obliging
that ere long the anxious Abner saw the lines begin to leave the
forehead of his better half.

This tickled him more than any well-won fight in the breakers might have
done, for he had a secret dread of Nancy's often ungovernable temper.

"The boy's gone and done it, blame me if he ain't!" he muttered to
himself, when he saw his wife actually smile over at where Darry was
sitting, with one of the twins on either side, entranced with some
figures he was drawing to illustrate a little story he had been telling
them about some sight seen in Naples.

When it came time to retire Darry was given a shake-down in the second
room.

He felt that he had made some sort of an impression upon the surfman's
wife, and that after all she might not prove so hard to win as he had
feared from what little he had heard about her temper.

That night was the most peaceful he had known for some time.

In the morning he was up before any one else stirred, and when Mrs Peake
made her appearance she found a bright fire burning in the kitchen,
plenty of wood on hand, a bucket of water from the spring handy, and a
boy only too anxious to do anything he was told in the way of chores.

Perhaps she may have had a suspicion that it would not last.

"A new broom sweeps clean," she remarked to Abner, as he appeared and
looked at her inquiringly