Mermaid’s blue eyes shone, even in the semi-darkness. From the very first she had liked living with her Dad’s sister, despite that sister’s dark moods and bleak rages, because Keturah Smiley had a gift for saying sharp, true things, and saying them so you remembered them. She had not been unkind to the girl and had even shown a certain grudging liking for her as Mermaid, whether from some natural gift or from crossing blades in conversational fencing, developed a faculty for thinking her own thoughts and putting them in her own words--and more and more the right words. They had many duels, and Keturah Smiley did not always win them. She early found in the child a streak of obstinacy as pronounced as her own. When Mermaid was convinced of her right Keturah might be able to silence her, but she would not be able to move her. And sometimes, to her dumb astonishment, Miss Smiley found herself giving ground. She had had to yield in quite a number of instances. When the eight-year-old girl had come to live in Blue Port she had refused to sleep with Miss Smiley, and Keturah had been forced to open a small bedroom for her after the night when the child had run out of the house and fastened herself in the woodshed. Mermaid had declined to walk two miles in the noon recess of school and Keturah found herself putting up a lunch and having the hot meal of her day at suppertime. This had irked her a good deal, for Mermaid would not merely walk but run two miles at play. The girl refused outright to wear to school a man’s old coat fixed over as a jacket. She was as contrary as possible, it seemed to Keturah, about her clothes. After repeated quarrels on the subject, in the last of which Mermaid had threatened to appeal to her Dad the next time he came over from the beach, Miss Smiley gave in. For it was true that her brother gave her money to clothe the child, and she knew him well enough to know that he would make her account for every cent of it. Keturah Smiley was strictly honest, but it galled her to put money on any one’s back. She would not even buy a mustard plaster, though she would buy those mustard plasters which went by the name of first mortgages--when she could get them sufficiently cheap. But she did not starve the girl; she set a good table. She was stingy with money and affection, but not with food and principles. In three years she had come to respect her brother’s adopted daughter, and sometimes to wonder where the girl got her firmness of character and general good humour. Keturah had never seen her in tears. Once, when she had been so angered as to lift her hand with a threat to strike Mermaid, the girl, without wincing, had said quietly: “If you hit me I’ll go away.”