CHAPTER I OPENING THE COTTAGE “HELLO there!” The man with grizzled hair and bronzed face under a shabby yachting-cap stopped in his leisurely ramble up the street of a seaport village, and his eyes lighted at sight of a spare feminine figure, whose lean vigorous arms were shaking a long narrow rug at a cottage gate. “Ahoy there—The Clever Betsy!” he went on. The energetic woman vouchsafed a sidewise twist of her mouth intended for a smile, but did not cease from her labors, and a cloud of dust met the hastened approach of the seaman. “Here, there’s enough o’ that! Don’t you know your captain?” he went on, dodging the woolen fringe which snapped near his dark cheek. “_My_ captain!” retorted the energetic one, while the rug billowed still more wildly. She was a woman of his own middle age, and the cloth tied around her head did not add to her charms; but the man’s eyes softened as they rested on her. “Here! You carry too much sail. Take a reef!” he cried; and deftly snatching the rug, in an instant it was trailing on the walk behind him, while Betsy Foster stared, offended. “How long ye been here, Betsy?” “A couple o’ days,” replied the woman, adjusting the cheese-cloth covering more firmly behind her ears. “Why didn’t ye let a feller know?” “Thought I wouldn’t trouble trouble till trouble troubled me.” The man smiled. “The Clever Betsy,” he said musingly. They regarded one another for a silent moment. “Why ain’t ye ever clever to me?” She sniffed. “Why don’t ye fat up some?” he asked again. “If I was as lazy as you are, probably I should,” she returned, with the sidewise grimace appearing again, and the breeze from the wide ocean a stone’s throw away ruffling the sparse straight locks that escaped from her headdress. “Goin’ to marry me this time, Betsy?” “No.” “Why not?” “Same old reason.” “But I _tell_ ye,” said the man, in half-humorous, half-earnest appeal, “I’ve told ye a dozen times I didn’t know which I liked best then. If you’d happened to go home from singin’-school with me that night it would ’a’ ben you.” “And I say it ain’t proper respect to Annie’s memory for you to talk that way.” “I ain’t disrespectful. There never were two such nice girls in one village before. I nearly grew wall-eyed tryin’ to look at you both at once. Annie and I were happy as clams for fifteen years. She’s been gone five, and I’ve asked ye four separate times if you’d go down the hill o’ life with me, and there ain’t any sense in your refusin’ and flappin’ rugs in my face.” “You know I don’t like this sort o’ foolin’, Hiram. I wish you’d be done with it.” “I ain’t ever goin’ to be done with it, Betsy, not while you live and I live.” “Have some sense,” she rejoined. “We both made our choice when we were young and we must abide by it—both of us.” “You didn’t marry the Bruce family.” “I did, too.”