Ruth smiled.
"I might have known you wouldn't," she said, "your own kind of people have your own sense of decency, and the others never have."
"I'm so glad I seem to you like your own kind of people." Elizabeth took Ruth Farraday's out-stretched hand gratefully.
"Well, you do, dear, and you always have. On your own account, I mean." she added, quickly.
"That's what I meant, too," said Elizabeth, shyly.
It was hard to sit through the mid-day meal with the secret that would change Buddy's world for him locked in her breast, still Elizabeth managed it somehow. He looked very pale and worn, but the three men kept up a lively discussion of the impending Presidential campaign and other political matters. She noticed the respect that both her father and Buddy paid to Grandfather's opinions on all these subjects.
Elizabeth wondered how it could be that Buddy could laugh his hearty laugh, before he knew the thing that she could have told him or how, when the conversation turned to the question of bait for a day's fishing on the banks that the three men contemplated, he could discuss worms and fishing tackle so eagerly.
"Speaking of fish," Buddy said, "it seems to me that these are extraordinarily good herrings we are eating. I don't suppose there is any difference in herrings, but——"
"Well, you don't suppose right, then," Grandfather said, "there is as much difference in the herrings that come from Herring River and those you get over to the westward as there is between some folks. The meat's whiter and sweeter in the Herring River herrings. I used to think it was a great thing to go after them in the spring. It don't make no difference where a herring has been putting in his time in the other seasons, come spring he makes for the river bed where he was born. I've seen them so thick on their way up Herring River that they couldn't swim straight, but had to kind of flop over one side to make way for t'other. I used to get five cents a hundred for 'em, and kitch 'em as fast as I could haul 'em out."