“I believe I got off better than I deserved.” Jimmy told her what Osborne had insisted on.
“So you are free for another year! I wonder whether you’re fickle.”
“I’m bound hand and foot forever! What’s more, I’ll hug my chains. But your father hinted that if I wished to see you, I’d have to win your aunt’s approval.”
“That won’t be hard,” Ruth laughed. “If you have no confidence in your own merits, you can leave it to me. Now, perhaps, you had better come and see her.”
Miss Dexter spent some time talking to Jimmy, and he found her blunt questions embarrassing; but she afterward remarked to her niece: “I like your sailor. He looks honest, and that is the great thing. Still, for some reasons, I’m sorry you didn’t take Aynsley, whom I’m fond of. It’s curious how little that young man resembles his father.”
“Clay had his good points,” Ruth said warmly. “He was very generous, and, although I don’t quite understand the matter, I think he really lost his life because he wanted to clear himself of all suspicion for his son’s sake.”
“It’s possible; there was something very curious about the wreck. He was a brigand, my dear; perhaps a rather gallant and magnanimous one, but a brigand, for all that.”
Osborne had come in quietly while she was talking.
“I owe Clay a good deal, and feel that he deserved more sympathy than he got,” he said. “He had his detractors, but the people who found most fault with him were not above suspicion themselves.”
“You are all brigands at heart,” Miss Dexter declared.