"A girl might wind him right around her finger, if she went at it right," Ida May Bostwick finally decided. "Some girl will. I wonder how long it would take to get him to sell out down there and live up here in town? My mother came from that awful hole, and she caught a city fellow. I bet I could do this, if it was worth my while. My goodness! Why not? "There's property there, too. I wonder how much those old creatures are worth. And how long they will live. He spoke like they needed somebody because they were sick. Ugh! I don't like folks when they are sick. Ma was _awful_. I can remember it. And there was pa, when he was cripped with rheumatism before he died." This phase of the matter fairly staggered Ida May Bostwick. She put the faint glimmerings of the idea out of her mind--or tried to. Yet that summer she kept delaying her vacation until all the other girls had come back and related all their adventures--those that had actually happened and those that they had imagined. "Ain't you going to take any time off, Ida May?" they asked. At last she said she expected to visit her folks "down on the Cape." "You remember that nice-looking farmer that came in to speak to me that time and took me to lunch at Barquette's?" she asked Miss Leary. "I know you _said_ he took you there." "Well, he did, smarty! He's my cousin--of course, not too close." And Ida May giggled. "Well, we've been corresponding." "I hope it's all perfectly proper," grinned Miss Leary. Ida May Bostwick stuck out her tongue. But she laughed. "I've got a good mind," she said to her friend, "to go down and see that fellow's folks. They're well fixed, I guess. And the store pays you for one week of your vacation. I wouldn't lose much, even if it did turn out to be a dead-and-alive hole." CHAPTER XIX THE ARRIVAL There was a driving road down past Latham's Folly and on across certain sand flats and by cranberry bogs to a small settlement where Prudence had a stepsister still living. This old woman lived with her granddaughter's husband's kinsfolk, who were so distantly related to Cap'n Ira's wife that the relationship could scarcely be followed. "It takes us Cape Codders," remarked Cap'n Ira, "to study out the shoals and channels of kinship. It's 'cause we're such good navigators that we're able to do it." "And now that we've got Ida May to harness up Queenie for us and look after the house while we're gone, and you feel so much spryer yourself, Ira, I don't see why we can't visit our folks a little," Prudence said. He agreed, and they set off in high fettle just before noon, expecting to return before dark. Sheila was upstairs dusting when, not long after the noon hour, she saw from one of the windows the spread canvas of the _Seamew_--there was no mistaking the schooner--making through the channel into the cove. "Tunis is coming! Tunis is coming! Tunis is coming soon!"