Both of us were quiet then, neither of us quite knowing what to say perhaps. Then together we started to walk to the corner of the side street. We were past the side-door of the boarding-house when a voice called out, "Oh, Maurice," and then, maybe noticing me, I suppose, "Oh, Captain Blake," and Maurice turned. Minnie Arkell--Mrs. Miner rather--was there at the kitchen window. I didn't know she was in town at all--thought she hadn't got back from Florida, or North Carolina, or wherever it was she had been for the winter. "Won't you come in a minute, Captain, and your friend? He doesn't remember me--do you, Joe?--and yet we were playmates once," which was true. I was often taken to Mrs. Arkell's when a little fellow by skippers who were friends of my father's. They used to tell me about him, and I liked to listen. "I thought I'd run over and see granny," she went on. "I'm back to the old house for a while. Won't you come in?" My mind had long been set against Minnie Arkell. I knew about her throwing over a fine young fellow, a promising skipper, to marry Miner. I may have been too young at the time to judge anybody, but after that I had small use for her. My ideas in the matter were of course pretty much what older men had put into me. I had listened to them--skippers and others--and yet now, when she held out her hand to me and smiled, I didn't feel nearly so set against her. She certainly was a handsome girl, and yet I hoped that Maurice wouldn't fall in love with her, as most everybody did that came to the Arkell house. I said that I did not have time to come in, and started to make off. Maurice asked me where I was bound. I told him that I thought of taking a look in at Crow's Nest and getting the news. "Yes, you'll get it there, sure enough. When they can't tell you anything else up there they can tell you what everybody's doing." He smiled at that, turned slowly toward the side-door, as if he would rather go with me to Crow's Nest, and I went off.