"I wish you wouldn’t!" she said in a low voice. "It fairly gets on my nerves. Everybody does it." "Does what, child?" asked Miss Heppy, with surprise. "Takes it for granted that Ralph Endicott and I are engaged." "Wal—you be sort o’ young, I suppose——" "If I was forty I wouldn’t be engaged to him!" flared up Lorna. "For love’s sake!" exclaimed the woman. "Don’t say that. Though at forty you ought to’ve been married to him a good many years," and she broke into an unctuous chuckle that shook her ample bosom like jelly. "I’ll never marry him!" cried the girl, but under her breath. "Now, now!" urged Miss Heppy. "You always be quarreling with Ralphie. But you know they’re jest love spats. He’s a good fellow——" "You don’t know what it means, Miss Heppy, to a girl to have a man just forced on her. Everybody trying to make her take him, willy-nilly." "Um-m. None warn’t never forced on me," admitted the woman, dividing her attention between the frying fishballs and Lorna’s affair of the heart. "But I reckon, Lorna, they couldn’t force a better boy on you." "That is one of the worst phases of it," declared the girl seriously. "There is not one single, solitary thing to be said against Ralph’s character. Unless—well, there was a girl when he went to college. At least, so they say. But I suppose all boys must have their foolish puppy-love affairs," concluded Lorna, with an owllike appearance of wisdom that revealed the quite unsophisticated girl who believes she "knows it all." Miss Heppy merely stared. In her secluded life love was _love_. There were no gradations known either as "puppy-love" or by other terms of rating. "It isn’t that Ralph isn’t good enough, Miss Heppy," whispered the girl. "But he’s been thrown at me all my life long!" She was not yet twenty-one. "I just _won’t_ marry him." She stamped her foot on the hearth. Tobias, who had been leisurely taking off his storm coat and unbuckling the strap of his sou’wester as he talked cheerfully to the rather glum looking Ralph, now turned to the women. "I feel some like stomping in my stall, too," was his comment upon Lorna’s emphatic punctuation of her whispered defiance. "Bear a hand with the supper, Heppy. I’ve got to go up to the gallery again and clear the snow off the lamp. It surely does stick to-night. I was just getting the glass clear when I heard you young folks shouting for rescue. "Come, Miss Lorna! Come, Ralph! Pull up cheers for yourselves. Supper’s ready, I cal’late, ain’t it, Heppy?" CHAPTER II CONFIDENCES The blast struck the light tower so heavily that Ralph Endicott felt the whole structure vibrate as he followed Tobias up the spiral stairway after supper. In spite of the lightkeeper’s jollity and Miss Heppy’s kindness, the supper had seemed to hearten but little the spirits of the young man.