“And you don’t mind waiting a whole year?”
Babe shook her head smilingly. “It takes a long while to get ready to be married, you know.”
“Because,” Mr. Morton went on, “there’s a very good place in my business waiting for a young man that knows how to talk ten different languages, more or less. If he wants it this September, he can have it. If he isn’t ready then, why I guess we’ll have to keep the place for him. Fellows that can talk ten languages don’t grow on every bush.”
John and Babbie had moved their chairs so that the party now sat in a close, confidential circle of its own.
“Thanks awfully, father,” John began, “but we’ve talked it over, Babe and I, and we’ve decided that I ought to go back. If I leave college now, I’ve been flunked out. I’d rather not have that kind of record behind me.”
Jasper J. Morton nodded. “That would be my idea, but I’d leave almost any kind of record behind me, I guess, sooner than disappoint this young lady.”
Far down the river there rose the faint sound of cheering.
“They’re coming!” cried an excitable English gentleman with a white umbrella. He lowered the umbrella and poked Mr. Morton’s shoulder with it vigorously. “You’d better stand on your chairs. It’s the only way to see.”
Nearer and nearer came the roar of applause—a great wave of sound that caught Betty and tossed her up on her chair and fairly took her breath away as she saw one—two black specks come into sight around a curve and dash forward, until, before she knew it, they were alongside.
But just before that something had happened in the second boat—the American boat, alas! The third man had caught a crab.