The old woman smiled and nodded.

“I must go up—but wait. I mustn’t make any noise, must I? Don’t tell her—don’t call. I want myself to bring the first word. She’ll like it better.”

“Yes, and more than the word, she’ll like the man that brings it. And go soon, Captain, for there’s that in your eyes would win queens from their thrones.”

Clancy removed his boots, the same great boots that till now had not been drawn from his feet since he had left Newfoundland. Upstairs he crept. A sound, well-built house it was, and the stairs did not creak under his weight. As he went up he heard her voice crooning softly. Changed it was, with new tones in it, but still her own voice always—no other voice like it. She was singing now; and on the landing, with the half-open door of her room no more than an arm’s length away, he stopped and listened. And, listening, waited, wondering curiously just why he waited. Night and day he had been driving—snow, ice, hail, gales of wind, and great seas—and during it all but one thought, to be where he was now. A hundred times he had pictured himself bounding up the stairs and into her arms. Yet now that he was here, he was waiting; now that he was so near, he lacked the courage to go in. And even while he hesitated the dear voice broke into a new song:

He waited no longer, and as through the door he had heard, so now in the doorway she saw him. And her face! He clasped her; mother and baby, he clasped them both, and pride as well as love rang in his voice.

“Ann, Ann, but where’s the man that wouldn’t carry sail for you!”

“Tommie—Tommie—home again!” and laid the baby in his arms and cried on his breast.

Harry Glover got home that night. His crew lost no time in getting ashore. It had been a notable passage, and they were wistful to ease the strain and to boast of some pretty fair work against a hard westerly along the way. And did boast, until they heard that Clancy was in before them.

“Well, I’m damned!” it was with them then—with all of them, that is, but Steve Clifford.

Clifford met Sam Leary along the way.

“I half expected it, Sam, as the rest of the crew’ll tell you. We were passing the fleet anchored on La Have. They hailed out something we couldn’t quite get. But the skipper thought it was something in praise of the sail he was carrying. He had her under four lowers then and was some proud. He called to me, knowing I’d been with Clancy a few trips. ‘Where’s your Johnnie Duncan?’ he says—‘where’s Tommie Clancy and your Johnnie Duncan at this writing, do you s’pose?”

“‘Where?’ says I. ‘Well, if I know Tommie Clancy and the Johnnie Duncan, she’s playin’ leap-frog across the Bay o’ Fundy by this time’—ho! ho! so help me, Sam—playing leap-frog across the Bay of Fundy—yes. And he’d liked to kill me then—yes.”

Later still Clancy met Glover—Glover the Diplomat, but with curious streaks of good nature in him. Clancy, with a package under one arm, was running like a little boy whose mother has sent him on an errand and told him to make haste. He had been to the drugstore, he explained, for a bottle of peptonised something or other.

“Tommie,” said Glover, “what d’ y’ say to a little touch?”