“Mother!” admonished Geraldine. “Please let Richard discover us properly. You are for ever guide-booking him. Phœbe Norris could never be explained with words.”
“Quite true, my dear,” the mother smiled at the thought, “quite true.... It does my soul good to get into an American ‘rocker’ at last.” She shifted the topic easily; and then shifted again at the vision of Jerry before her, one of the many signs of the change that had come over her. “Isn’t it strange, Richard, that my girl should be the athlete and my boy should not even be able to swim?”
“Why should he need to swim?” Richard had laid his plan and went resolutely to put it into execution. “Very few sailors can swim. Walter’s a born sailor. Do you know that you are going to buy him a boat and let him lift the Lake cup?”
“Eh?” she turned to this confident man with a touch of her old resentment towards being managed. “I said he should never own a boat or sail it alone until——”
“Of course you did,” Richard interrupted, glancing down upon the Lake where Walter was plainly coming about on his second tack. “We all say a lot of foolish things. And now you’re going to buy him one and let him employ that mind of his. If you don’t,” he raised his voice to drown the beginning of a protest, “you will send him to the devil as certain as if you had signed his commission. Weak as he is, he’s got your Virginia determination; and when he goes to the devil it will be on the gallop. I know; for I am a strong man, but he almost succeeded in breaking down my grip on the rope rail on the Victoria—all by sheer will, too—and if he had——”
Mrs. Wells ceased rocking. She looked helplessly at Richard, mutely begging him not again to force that picture into her mind.
“Well,” he spoke calmly, “you are going to give up, aren’t you—for the sake of that boy?”
Walter had broken a tack suddenly in the middle of the Lake, obviously to take quick advantage of a change of wind.
“Yes—I suppose so.”
“Good! Now let’s go the whole way forward. Not only are you going to let him have the boat, but you are going to tell him so—without a word about the past; just as if the matter had never come up before—and you are going to give him the money so that he may buy it himself.”