Washing the decks and performing other like offices fell to his share on that first bright day, when to sail over the blue calm sea, with the crisp air blowing from the great German Ocean, was a pleasant sensation in itself.
But night came on, and the stars looked down from their immeasurable depths; and Jack, lying on a bench, with his arms folded, and his face resting on them, had time to think.
He had done it now. Often, when in a storm of passion he had said he would leave his aunt's roof for ever, he had relented, and even at his mother's instigation and entreaty had expressed sorrow for his burst of anger, and asked to be forgiven.
He had done this only a fortnight before, and his aunt had received his apology with a short—
"It's all very well to think by saying you are sorry you make it all right. It's deeds not words, for me."
This ungracious manner of receiving an expression of contrition had often hardened the boy's heart against his aunt. Still more so when, from the other side of the parlour, Mr. Skinner would say, in a nasal, squeaky voice—
"It's a wonder to me how your kind, generous aunt puts up with you for a single hour. Only a good woman like her would give you house room at all."
"What business is it of yours, I should like to know?" had been Jack's retort; and all the real sorrow he had felt, awakened by his mother's gentle words, had vanished.
That Skinner! How he hated him; how instinctively he turned from him with positive dislike and loathing.
Now, as he lay alone and unnoticed beneath the star-strewn sky of the summer night, it was not of Skinner that he thought, not of his aunt, not of anything he had suffered—but of his mother.