Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/298

288 shoving his hands into his overcoat pockets set out at a brisk walk in the direction of the city's docks.

A little later the three letters directed to Mr. James Perkins had left the young man's pocket, and were locked up in a stout little chest, inside the cabin of a trading-schooner, heavy with cargo. In the morning, while the letters were rising and falling with the efforts of the schooner as it dug its nose into a gale of no small proportions, the author of those letters, far away from salt sea-spray, drenched sails, and wet and slippery decks, was seated in a pretty dining-room, beside a silver coffee-pot, eating soft-boiled eggs from a frail glass cup.

After Nathaniel Cawthorne had left his packet of letters in the little cabin of the schooner, the night before, he had returned directly to the house where the woman had spoken to him as he went out. He had let himself in with a key from his own pocket, called up the stairs cheerily, "Everybody in?" and upon receiving an answer in the affirmative, had turned off the electric light, and slipped the night-bolt across the door.

The woman was waiting for him when he reached the second floor. He could see her through the glass doors as he climbed the stairs. She was seated in a gaily covered, winged arm-chair in front of the open fire.

"Come in, Nathan," she called to him.

He obeyed.

It was a pretty room he entered, typically a woman's, with a couch in one corner piled high with lingerie pillows. There were several rocking-chairs, and the cretonne hangings at the windows were in soft shades