Bartlett laid his hand tenderly on her shoulder. "Forget him, girlie. He’s not worthy of you." "He said he would come," whispered Billy. "If he doesn’t, dear, you have me. We have stood together through everything for eighteen years and will stand, still, eh, Billy?" Billy bent her head and rubbed her cheek against the hand on her shoulder with a half laugh and a half sob. With the first sight of the smoke on the horizon, heralding the approach of the principal event of the day, the arrival of the evening mail, a crowd had begun to gather, the usual motley crowd of a summer resort on the coast. Townspeople hung indifferently on the outskirts, while the summer visitors, in dainty dresses and baggy trousers, sun-burnt, jovial, indefatigable, pressed to the front. The hum of talk and laughter grew as the crowd grew, good-natured, meaningless chatter. The sight of the _Mary Gloucester_, steaming gracefully into port, was greeted with a gay flutter of handkerchiefs and straw hats, and Billy and Bartlett, standing where the yacht would dock, were soon the center of the laughing, merry crowd, ready and eager to welcome home the stout widow, her unfortunate chaperon and the two "supplements," as a village wag called the fat Henry and the slim Bertie. As the yacht drew near, the widow’s corpulent form was seen by the rail, on one side a tall youth, and on the other, two, side by side and apparently in no very good humor. "Three, by George," cried Blatts, a prosperous brewer from Milwaukee. "She left here with two and returns with three. Where did she get him, Bartlett?" But Bartlett did not answer, did not hear. The gang-plank had been lowered and he was watching in numb fascination, the tall youth walking beside the widow, her ridiculous dog in his arms. It was Jeroboam Martin in an immaculate white suit of Bertie’s. His hat was off and his hair, after the swim, gleamed soft and yellow. For the sake of the widow upon whose boat he found himself, he had shaved as well as he could with Henry’s razor, and while his cheeks were smooth enough, he still wore a small yellow mustache and goatee. Both were brushed until they shone like his hair and they lent a fascinating and distinctly foreign air to his long, thin, clever face. In his arms was the little dog with its enormous bow of sky-blue ribbon. Bartlett wondered if he were going mad and seeing things that were not so. At two, or thereabouts, he had seen Martin, dirty, shabby, tired, and had given him money on which to get drunk. At seven, a yacht, which had not been in Westhaven for over a week, carefully deposits the youth, clean, fresh, well-dressed at his very side. Was he mad?