noon
As he walked by the Lunn house , on his way to and from the harbor side , he looked at it with a feeling of relationship and love ; he admired the clean white curtains at the windows , he envied the plump tortoise-shell cat on the side doorstep ; if he saw the composed and pleasant face of Maria glancing up from her sewing , he swept his hat through the air with as gallant a bow as Longport had ever seen , and blushed with joy and pride . Maria Lunn owned to herself that she liked him best , as far as he himself was concerned ; while she invariably settled it with her judicious affections that she must never think of encouraging the captain , who , like herself , was too poor already . Put to the final test , he was found wanting ; he was no man of business , and had lost both his own patrimony and early savings in disastrous shipping enterprises , and still liked to throw down his money to any one who was willing to pick it up . But sometimes , when she saw him pass with a little troop of children at his heels , on their happy way to the candy-shop at the corner , she could not forbear a sigh , or to say to herself , with a smile , that the little man was good-hearted , or that there was nobody who made himself better company ; perhaps he would stop in for a minute as he came up the street again at noon . Her sewing was not making , but mending , in these days ; and the more she had to mend , the more she sat by one of her front windows , where the light was good . One evening toward the end of summer there came a loud rap at the knocker of Mrs. Lunn 's front door . It was the summons of Captain Asa Shaw , who sought a quiet haven from the discomforts of the society of his sisters-in-law and his notoriously ill-bred children .