By this time I could well make out how neither of these women was of vigorous intelligence. A malignant spirit, and a ripe aptness for evil to others. I could read in their vinegar faces and the fault-finding gather to their brows; but no power of thought, nor yet much cunning. I leaned back now, inquisitive as to Noah's methods and to note their results. Noah led the talk up and down the town. He made it cover several years, for the Cravens were not newcomers in the place. At last he considered the navy and mentioned Timberlake. Had the young lady known the handsome purser Timberlake? The young lady had known the handsome purser Timberlake. A forbidding scowl contorted her features as she said this. “Oh, I beg a thousand pardons!” cried Noah. He had caught the scowl. “I fear the mention of the handsome Timberlake is not agreeable. But he cut his throat, and there's the proper villain end of him.” The butt-end cruelty of Noah's manner I was sure possessed a purpose, for commonly he was one of your most guarded of folk. While I had this in thought, it did not lessen my dismay when the daughter fell to weeping with her face in her hands, and all in frantic kind. Sobbing, she left the room. “An affair of the heart?” cooed Noah, sympathetically, to the mother, while the Reverend Campbell fidgeted visibly. “Sir,” said the mother, loftily, “you touched her rudely. Mr. Timberlake was paying my daughter marked attentions, and ones not to be misunderstood, when he was stolen from her side and trapped to the altar by that wanton, Peg O'Neal.” “Sorry, I assure you,” murmured Noah, apologetically. “Sorry I so blundered against your daughter's sensibilities. Please recall her, madam, if only to hear me ask forgiveness.” The daughter, whose emotion was of the briefest, returned, with nose reddened and look more bilious than before. Noah became profuse in his regrets, and severely characterized his own awkwardness. “Nor are you to have blame for your feeling,” said he, addressing the daughter and as a finish to his self-reproaches. “Your mother has done us the honor to confide the once nearness of the handsome purser Timberlake to you. And that hideous woman who stole him away! I do not marvel you hate her. I could teach you to write her such a letter as should be a revenge; for I know one of her secrets, the very name of which would crush her like a falling tree.” It was to me a thing astounding how neither of these women resented the raw freedom of Noah's words. On the contrary, they went with him, making no question of the propriety of such talk on the tongue of a stranger. They would appear not to have been crossed by such a thought, for, so to phrase it, they fell in with Noah, and, as if it were, hand in hand. At the word “secrets,” both women sat bolt upright and questioned Noah with tongue and eye. What was this hidden sin of that siren, Peg O'Neal? They panted for a fullest tale of it.