“It seems quite likely,” replied her companion. “It couldn’t have been your daughter, because she went along the beach not long ago with the major, and I don’t think there’s another young lady in the vicinity.”
“Then the other must be—the packer.”
The pause and the slight change of inflection as she said “the packer” had not quite the effect she had intended. Stirling himself had once labored with his hands, and, what was more, afterward had a good deal to bear on that account. He was not particularly vindictive, but he remembered it.
“Yes, it’s Weston,” he said, and his companion felt herself corrected; but she was, at least where Major Kinnaird was not concerned, in her quiet way a persistent woman. Besides, Miss Stirling, who was going with her to England, would some day come into considerable possessions, and she had a son who found it singularly difficult to live on the allowance his father made him.
“Is it altogether advisable that she should go out with him?” she asked.
Stirling smiled somewhat dryly, for there was a vein of combativeness in him, and she had stirred it.
“You mean, is it safe? Well, I guess she’s quite as safe as she would be with me or the major.”
“Major Kinnaird was a flag officer of a rather famous yacht club,” said the lady, who, while she fancied that her companion meant to avoid the issue, could not let this pass. She was, however, mistaken in one respect, for Stirling usually was much more ready to plunge into a controversy than to back out of it.
“Well,” he said reflectively, “the other man has earned his living handling sail and people, which is quite a different thing.”
Then he leaned toward her, with a twinkle in his eyes.