“After all these months?” groaned Mr. Stagg. “The old fellow may tell the truth, as far as he’s gone, and as far as he knows; but if they were alive we’d have heard about it before now. That African coast isn’t a desert—nor yet a wilderness—nowadays. Those Arabs have been pretty well tamed, I reckon. No, we’d have heard long before this.” “I’m sorry,” said Miss Amanda simply. “Thank—thank you,” murmured Joseph Stagg before she closed the door. He went on to town, his mind strangely disturbed. It was not his sister’s fate that filled his heart and brain, but thoughts of Miss Amanda. She had deliberately broken the silence of years! Of course, it might be attributed to her interest in Carolyn May only, yet the hardware dealer wondered. He could not get interested in the big ledger that afternoon. Old Jimmy, the cat, leaped upon his desk, purring, and walked right across the fair page of the book, making an awful smudge where the ink was not dry, and Joseph Stagg merely said: “Scat, Jimmy!” and paid no further attention. Out through the office window he stared, and out of the transom above the front door. He could see a blue patch of sky, across which now and then a grey-white cloud floated. In those floating clouds Mr. Stagg began to read a future which had little to do with the dull prospect of the hardware store itself. “_Look up!_” The thought came to him while his countenance was a-smile. His reverie had surely inspired a pleasanter feeling within and a happier expression without. Carolyn May’s reiterated phrase rather startled Joseph Stagg. “Why, the child’s right,” he murmured. “It’s looking up makes a man dream of happiness. But—it’s only a dream, I reckon. Only a dream.” His immediate thoughts did not fall into the old groove, however. Not at once. When he went home to supper that evening he boldly stared at the Parlow house, on the watch for something. There were lights in the kitchen and the dining-room. And was that a figure moving cautiously behind the lace curtains at the front-room window? CHAPTER XVIII—SOMETHING CAROLYN MAY WISHES TO KNOW Carolyn May’s heart was filled with trouble. She had, ere this, proved herself to be a deeply thoughtful child, and the grown people about her did not suspect how much she was disturbed by a new subject of thought. This was the result of her first talk with the old sailor. Not from him, nor from anybody else, did Carolyn May get any direct information that the sailor had been aboard the _Dunraven_ on her fatal voyage. But his story awoke in the child’s breast doubts and longings, uncertainties and desires that had lain dormant for many weeks. “I do wish, Princey,” she told her mongrel friend, her single really close confidant, “that my papa and mamma were like the folks buried there behind the church,” and she sighed. “I’d know just where they were, then. That part of ’em that’s dead, I mean. But now we don’t know much about it, do we?