She looked over his figures.
"It is plain enough why it is not right," she said, after a moment, in her schoolmistress tone. "Your calculations are wrong. Give me a pencil." She went to work at once, and soon had a whole sheet covered. "It will take me some time," she said, glancing up at the end of a quarter of an hour. "If you are tired, mother, you had better go back."
"I think I will," said Mrs. Manning, whose mind was now on the darkness and the row-boat. Bro went with her, and then returned. The mother no more thought of asking her daughter to leave a column of unfinished figures than of asking a child to leave an unfinished cake.
"Do not interrupt me now, but sit down and wait," said Marion, without looking up, when Bro came back. He obeyed, and did not stir; instead, he fell to noticing the effect of her profile against the red cloth over the window. It took Marion longer than she expected to finish the calculation; her cheeks glowed over the work. "There!" she said at last, throwing down the pencil and pushing the paper toward him. She had succeeded; the difficulty was practically at an end. Bro looked at the paper and at her with admiring pride.
"It is your invention now," he said.
"Oh, no; I only did the sum for you. Astronomers often have somebody to do the sums for them."
"I shall apply for patents on all three now," said Bro; "and the register is yours, Miss Marion. In eleven years I have not succeeded in doing what you have just done in an hour."
"So much the worse for you, Ambrose," replied Marion lightly. She was quite accustomed to his praise, she had had it steadily from childhood. If not always gracefully expressed, at least it was always earnest; but, like Ambrose, of no consequence.
Bro made his application in due form. Young Vickery volunteered to write to an acquaintance in Washington, a young lawyer, who aspired to "patent business," asking him, as he expressed it, to "see Bro through." "No sharp practice in this case, Dan," he wrote privately. "Cranch is poor, and a friend of friends of mine; do your best for him."
But, although he thus good-naturedly assisted the man, he laughed at the woman for her part in the figures, which Bro had related with pride.