"You've just guessed it, Master Paul! It makes me blood boil when I think of it!"
Then he ended up, as he always did: "Ah, it's a dog's life, is the sea! Don't you ever think of the sea, Master Paul!"
Paul knew from what quarter the final moral, with which Job invariably favoured him, came. Usually he smiled; but there was no smile on his face now. He could understand his mother's feelings as he had never understood them before. He could understand why she so rarely spoke of that time—why she never referred to his father's death.
"You can't remember the man's name, I suppose?"
"No, I can't remember that," answered Job, rubbing his head thoughtfully, "'cept that it was a foreign one—Zuker, I think it was, or some such name as that. Don't think no more about it. Thinking about it don't do no good."
"Poor, poor father!" said Paul, as he turned once more towards the house. "He must have been a brave man. Oh, that I could have seen him, and known him, so that I might be able to remember him as he was in life, instead of carrying about a dead image in my heart!"
Still, it was a comfort to know that his father had been loved by those under him—that he had died a brave death. Better, far better, to die a brave death than to live on in shame and infamy, as the man had probably lived whom his father had saved.
And yet this mean, despicable spy might have turned over a new leaf from the day his father had sacrificed his life to save him. He might have begun a new and nobler life. If so, the sacrifice had not been in vain.