When she came back to Gloucester she was still a very handsome girl, spoken of as the "Miner widow" among people who had known her only since her marriage, but still called Minnie Arkell by most of those who had known her when she was a child. In Gloucester she bought the first house just around the corner from her grandmother's. A handy passage between their two back yards allowed her to visit her grandmother whenever she pleased. She wanted to be near her own people, she said, and was more in her grandmother's house than her own. Maurice came down the steps of Mrs. Arkell's boarding-house as I came along, and joined me on the sidewalk. He asked me the first thing if I wouldn't have a drink, and I said no. "Oh, I forgot," he said, "you don't drink. Have a cigar," and he pulled one out of his pocket, and I took and lit it. Generally I smoked a pipe, but I liked good cigars, though I couldn't afford them myself. This was not a good one--more like the kind they hand out in bar-rooms when men get tired of drinking and say they guess they'll have a smoke. "How does it happen, Joe, you're not at the store? I always thought Withrow held his men pretty close to hours." "Well, so he does, but I'm not working for him now." And then I told him that I had had an argument with Withrow, been discharged, and was thinking of going fishing. I didn't tell him at first how it all came about, but I think he guessed it, for all at once, after a searching look, he reached out and shook hands with me. "If ever I get a vessel again, Joe, and you still want to go fishing and care for a chance with me, you can have it--if you can't go with a better man, I mean. I'll take you and be glad to have you." That meant a good berth, of course, for Maurice was a killer. I looked at Maurice when he wasn't watching me, and felt sorry for him. He was a man that anybody would like the looks of. It wasn't that he was a handsome man--I never could get to like pretty men myself--but there was something about him that made you feel you could trust him. The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would spoil almost anybody for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you'd like to stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that he'd saved that particular smile for you. He was no better built than a hundred other men I knew who were going fishing, and he was no bigger than a thousand others sailing out of Gloucester, and not near so big as a lot of others--five feet ten or eleven, maybe, he was, with level shoulders, and very light on his feet--but looking at him you knew he was all there.