“Why, man, you’re worrying yourself for nothing! It’s a lovers’ quarrel—no more. I thought, by the look of you, there was murder in the wind! Come, there’s no sense in whistling up your own ill-luck. The girl will be round again at the swing of the pendulum by this time to-morrow. She’ll pull up to the pole all right, you take my word!”
The old man shook a dogged contradiction.
“You’ve seen Lup,” he said. “You know how far there’s bending him. Have you seen the lass, sir? Nay? What, then——” on a sudden, cheering impulse—“see here, sir, suppose you put in a word?”
“What’s that?” Lancaster laughed again, amused but embarrassed. “You want me to tackle her—talk to her nicely, point out what she’s throwing away? That’s a bit too much to ask, Wolf! I’m not agent for Bluecaster for that.”
“She’d happen take it from you. She’d ha’ took it from your father, Mr. Lancaster. There’s a many he’s talked into a right way o’ thinking—ay, an’ women-folk among ’em!—as is glad and proud of it to-day.”
“Yes, but I’m——” Lancaster looked rather helpless—“well—not my father, Wolf!”
“You’re your father’s son. What a Lancaster says, goes—with most of us. You’ll try it, sir?”
“I don’t see how I can. What has your wife to say about it?”
“Something of the same mak as Lup, sir—lile or nowt, an’ nowt most often of the two. She sticks to it there’s trouble ahead, anyhow, and it’s no odds what road it travels. She’s got a queer trick of sitting an’ watching the tide, like as if she’s waiting to see something happen.”
“But surely she’s tried to make Lup hear reason?”