But Sidney did not hear this simple philosophy for she had dropped to the floor of Top Notch and covered her ears with her hands. Her face flamed with the anger that held her. How _dared_ they sit there and talk her over! And say that she was going to write poetry! That she had something or other and might be greater than her father! A poet! Well, she _wouldn't_! _She would not!_ She thought, with stinging humiliation, of the verses she had written in her attic den and that lay now hidden in the secret place under the floor. She'd written them just because they hummed so in her ears that she had _had_ to write them, but when she returned home she'd tear them into tiny bits and never, _never_ write another line, even though the words did jingle and hum. She sat cramped on the floor of Top Notch, until she was certain the intruders had gone away. Then she got stiffly to her feet and reached for "Dorothea." Hot tears of mortification blinded her eyes so that she had to dash them away with the back of her hand. One splashed upon the page she had opened. "I have come, dear Dorothea, to another crossroad in life. You only shall witness my solemn vow. _I shall not be a poet!_ I shall be a missionary. A missionary's life is fraught with danger and takes them to distant climes and they have to dress in what is given to them out of a barrel--" She felt a little better and pleasantly sacrificial after she had written this vow. Poor Sidney, she did not know that the words that Lavender had likened to music and the beating sea would sing in her ears as persistently in Timbuctoo as in the quiet of her attic den! CHAPTER XV CAP'N PHIN What made life at Sunset Lane so delightful to Sidney was that she never knew from one day to the next what she was going to do. Back at Middletown everything was always arranged ahead--they did this on Tuesday and this on Wednesday and always on Saturday there was the League. At Sunset Lane she did not even know when it was Tuesday or Thursday unless she stopped to think; jolly things happened as though they popped out of the blue ether. Like that Miss Letty dropped in one evening after supper. "Do you want to ride over to Wellfleet with me enough to be ready at six o'clock?" she asked Sidney very casually, as though it were nothing at all to suggest. Sidney had longed to ride with Miss Letty in the sideboard buggy behind King who, Mr. Dugald declared, had come off the Ark with Noah. And to go to Wellfleet, perhaps see her friend Cap'n Phin Davies! "Can we call on Cap'n Davies?" she asked eagerly. Miss Letty smiled. "I reckon I couldn't steer King away from Elizy Davies' house. I thought I'd take you there and leave you while I give my lessons and then I'd ride 'round and have a visit with Elizy and Phin and maybe some of Elizy's gingerbread. Elizy and I went to school together."