“I am going far away, far away to leave you now,
To the Mississippi River I am going—”
But this was only so much suggestion for her son’s active brain. “Tell her, mother,” he begged, pulling at Charlotte’s sleeve; “tell her about the ‘King William.’”
“And it has lain dormant, this egotism, unsuspected,” came up from out of the dusk.
Charlotte’s fingers swept the chords, her eyes fixed adoringly on her little son’s face, the while she sang on, absently, softly:
“Down in my ol’ cabin home,
There lies my sister an’ my brother.
There lies my wife, the joy of my life,
An’ the child in the grave with its mother.”
But King William, far from being harrowed by the woeful enumeration, laid an imperious hand on the strings. “Tell her, mother; I want you to tell her.”
“Come then, and kiss mother, and I will.”
He moved the intervening step and submitted a cheek reluctantly. “Just one and you said you’d tell.”
But Charlotte, imperious herself, waved him off; she’d none of him now. “It’s because he’s a vain boy, little Mary Alexina Blair, and filled with self-importance, that he wants you to know, and he only wants me to tell you because he has not quite the assurance to do it himself; that is why he wants me to tell about the great, white-prowed Argo—”
“We call them bows, not prows,” came up out of the dusk.