“I was just wonderin' if 'twas right for us to be so happy.”
“Right?”
“Yes. Have we been—well, good enough this past year to deserve happiness like this?”
Shadrach grinned.
“I ain't puttin' in any testimony on my own hook,” he said, dryly, “but I don't seem to remember your bein' desperately wicked, Zoeth. Course you MAY have got drunk and disorderly that time when Mary-'Gusta and I left you and went to Boston, but I kind of doubt it.”
“Hush, hush, Shadrach! Don't joke about serious things. What I mean is have you and I walked the Lord's way as straight as we'd ought to? We've tried—that is, seems 's if we had—but I don't know. Anyhow, all this afternoon I've had a funny feelin' that you and me and Mary-'Gusta was—well was as if the tide had been comin' in for us all these years since she's been livin' with us, and as if now 'twould begin to go out again.”
The Captain laughed. “And that's what you call a FUNNY feelin'!” he exclaimed. “Zoeth, I've got a funny feelin', too, but I know what's the reason for it—the reason is turkey and plum puddin' and mince pie and the land knows what. When a couple of old hulks like you and me h'ist in a cargo of that kind it's no wonder we have feelin's. Good night, shipmate.”
CHAPTER XIII
The day after New Year's Mary went back to Boston and to school. The long winter term—the term which Madeline Talbott, whose father was a judge, called “the extreme penalty”—began. Boston's famous east winds, so welcome in summer and so raw and penetrating in winter, brought their usual allowance of snow and sleet, and the walks from Pinckney Street to the school and back were not always pleasant. Mrs. Wyeth had a slight attack of tonsillitis and Miss Pease a bronchial cold, but they united in declaring these afflictions due entirely to their own imprudence and not in the least to the climate, which, being like themselves, thoroughly Bostonian, was expected to maintain a proper degree of chill.