With the true status of her father’s position, financially and morally, Sylvena was mercifully unacquainted, for when she had fearfully questioned him he had as fearfully paltered and denied. The old dog Eli was the only one who was really cheered by the visits of Phineas Look to the Willard place. At first he had sat on the door-step of the office, meditatively gazing out across the Cove. Then one day he remarked a very pretty lady who was surveying him from the window of the house, and was apparently motioning to him. But as Eli had never found that pretty ladies were at any time much interested in fuzzy old dogs, he reckoned he must be mistaken about the beckoning. However, he gently wagged his tail in order to be on the safe side of agreeability. Then he looked away with some embarrassment. “Well, if that isn’t like master, like dog, may I be blessed,” stated the lady in the window to herself with much decision. She came to the door, opened it a bit, and called through the crack with impatient tone: “Here, you old fool, come in here and get a bite to eat. I’d like to speak out in just that same way to some one else,” she added. Eli promptly detected something like hostility in the voice and stopped wagging his tail. He hunched down his head and dropped his ears. The lady surveyed him with disfavour. “I suppose if I get down on my knees and put out both hands and smile and say, ‘Doggie, doggie, dear, good doggie, come here!’ why, then doggie will condescend to come. But I won’t do it!” She closed the door with an emphatic slam that made Eli jump, and went back to the window. But something in the mien of the old dog, who sat wistfully eyeing the closed door, touched her heart. “I’m blaming him for something he don’t know--something he don’t understand,” she murmured at last, pity in her eyes. She went to the door and opened it wide. Then she stooped forward and wriggled her fingers coaxingly as she said: “You nice old fellow, come here.” He hesitated. She pursed her lips and invited him with crisp little noises that sounded like kisses. She must have realised the suggestiveness of these sounds, for she suddenly blushed furiously and began to call to the dog softly and winningly. He came, his shaggy ears cocked up with expectancy, his tail expressing his most genial appreciation of the invitation. That was Eli’s first visit to the Willard kitchen in company with the pretty lady. If he’d had a tongue that could speak, instead of merely loll in thankful gusto after his repasts in that kitchen, he could have told Squire Phin of a pretty lady with red cheeks and a touch of gray at her temples who often snuggled her face close to his tousled ears and spoke in a tone sometimes that amazed him mightily, and who one day rose in haste, drove some tears from her eyes, and said with the determination of a woman who has searched and found: “You’d better come along, too, Eli, for it’s business that concerns that master of yours!”