“‘Evil at heart’” repeated Mrs. Hedge, reflectively. “No, perhaps not.”
“He is a little wild, to be sure.”
“‘A little wild!’ He is enough to break Miss Sibby’s heart!”
“I don’t see why. He is no kin to her.”
“No; but she loves him as if he were her only son. She liked to have cried her eyes out when he went to sea, you know.”
“Yes, I know. And yet it was as good a career as he could enter upon. The merchant service is not so genteel as the navy, to be sure, but, then, it is really more promising, in a lucrative point of view, and a young man of no family need not mind about the gentility.”
“Yet that is just what grieved Miss Sibby’s heart—that her adopted nephew should be obliged to gratify his passion for the sea by entering the merchant service instead of the United States Navy.”
“Poor Miss Sibby! It is hard to say whether her pride in her own descent or her love for her adopted nephew is her ruling passion,” concluded Miss Grandiere, with a smile.
Their walk had now brought them to the borders of a frozen creek, on the other side of which stood a small farmhouse, surrounded by a few outbuildings.
This was “Forest Rest,” or “Miss Sibby’s,” as it was frequently called.