This frank statement gave Foster Townsend the idea he had been seeking. He wrote to an acquaintance who lived in Boston. This acquaintance was the widow of a former clerk in the office of Cook and Townsend, occupied a small house in the Roxbury district and occasionally “let rooms” or even took a boarder, provided the latter’s credentials were of the best. And this widow was under heavy obligations for financial favors extended by her late husband’s employer. The reply he received was satisfactory. Yes, indeed, the lady would be only too delighted to provide food and shelter for her benefactor’s niece. “If she comes to me I shall look out for her as if she was my own daughter. You may be sure of that.” Townsend’s answer was brief. “I shall expect you to be sure of it,” he wrote. Then he wrote to the head of the New England Conservatory of Music. When all these preliminaries were settled he took the matter up, not with Esther herself, but with her aunt. Reliance listened to the plan with evident interest but in silence. “So there it is,” concluded Townsend. “The girl has got a good voice, so everybody says. So good that it would be a shame not to give it every chance to be better. You can’t do that down here. She can study at the Conservatory and stay with this Carter woman from Monday till Friday. Jane Carter is a good woman, strict and church-going and all that; she comes of a first-class Boston family who stick by her even if she is a poor relation. Humph!” he added, with an amazed grunt, “you’d think Cap’n John Hancock and Commodore Winthrop and the rest of ’em were her brothers and sisters to hear her talk sometimes. She puts up with my fo’castle manners because she has to, but I always feel as if I was King Solomon’s bos’n calling on the Queen of Sheba when I go into that house. Funny, isn’t it?... Well, Esther will be kept in the straight and narrow path while she is there--and there will be nobody but bluebloods allowed in the path with her. And Saturdays and Sundays, of course--and vacations--she will be down here with me--with us. What do you think of the scheme, Reliance?” Reliance said she thought well of it. “It will be a wonderful thing for Esther,” she declared. “But it will be a little hard for you, I should think. You got her up to your house because you were lonesome. Now you are goin’ to send her somewhere else. What is the matter? Isn’t your first notion workin’ out as well as you expected?” He jingled the change in his pocket. “No trouble so far as I’m concerned,” he said. “She’s a good girl and a clever girl and I want her to have every chance that belongs to her. I am thinking of her, not of myself.... Now what are you shaking your head about? Don’t you believe me?” Reliance smiled. “It is a little bit hard for me to believe you aren’t thinkin’ of yourself some, Foster,” she said.