know why I'm talking so frankly with you, who are almost a stranger,
but I've been--I have always lacked friends so much, that now I can't
seem to help it. You truly do seem like an old friend, you have been
so willing to do what I asked of you, after you had time to think
it over."

The Cap'n was now congratulating himself that he hadn't blurted out
anything about the bridge director and that sapling fence. It
certainly was a grateful sound--that praise from the pretty lady!
He didn't want to interrupt it.

"Now will you go on with that story of the storm?" she begged,
hitching the chair a bit nearer. "I want to hear about your
adventures."

She had all the instincts of Desdemona, did that pretty little lady.
Three times that week she came to the toll-house and listened with
lips apart and eyes shining. Cap'n Sproul had never heard of Othello
and his wooing, but after a time his heart began to glow under the
reverent regard she bent on him. Never did mutual selection more
naturally come about. She loved him for the perils he had braved,
and he--robbed of his mistress, the sea--yearned for just such
companionship as she was giving him. He had known that life lacked
something. This was it.

And when one day, after a stuttering preamble that lasted a full half
hour, he finally blurted out his heart-hankering, she wept a little
while on his shoulder--it being luckily a time when there was no one
passing--and then sobbingly declared it could never be.