She would walk and walk and walk—it would feel so good to walk! Once she had said to Judith—the great oars stopped as Judith remembered—once Blossom had said, “Oh, Judy, if I ever walk, I shall walk right across the sea. You couldn’t stop me!”
But Blossom would never walk. Judith bent to the great oars again and toiled out into the bay. Her lips were set in the old familiar lines of pain. In the distance was just visible a fleck of white and a fleck of blue—Elise and the Dainty One on the sands.
“I never want to set eyes on them again—not on her, anyway!” thought Judith as she toiled. “What did she want to speak to me for, in her nice little mincing voice! She belongs to hotels and I belong to the—sea. Blossom and I—what has she got to do with Blossom!”
But the little mincing voice had said, “I’d be pleased to see you—I like you.” It had said, “I’d be pleased to see Blossom.”
“She sha’n’t! I won’t have her! I won’t have Blossom see her!” Judith stormed in her pain.
The picture of the little frail wisp of a child who would never walk was so distinct to her—and this other picture of the Dainty One who walked and laughed, “See me!” The two little pictures, side by side, were more than Judith could bear.
The traps were nearly empty. It was going to be a poor lobster season. To hotels like that one down the beach that would be a disappointment. To Judith, who stood for fisher-folk, it would mean serious loss. When the lobster season was a good one, more than one little comfort and luxury found its way into more than one humble fisher-home. And Blossom—Blossom would suffer if the lobster-traps were empty. For Judith and her mother had agreed to set apart enough of the lobster-money to get Blossom a wheel-chair. Judith had seen one once on a trip to the nearest town, and ever since she had dreamed about a little wheel-chair with Blossom in it. To wheel up and down the smooth, hard sand, with Blossom laughing and crying, “See me!”
“There’s got to be lobsters!” Judith stormed, jerking up her traps one after the other. “There shall be lobsters!”
But she rowed back with the old brown dory almost as empty as when she had rowed it toilsomely out to her traps.
There were but three Lynns in the small home upshore. Two years ago there had been six, but father and the boys, one day, had gone out of sight beyond the bay and had never come into sight again. It is the sad way with those “who go down to the sea in ships.”