Paul nodded. "Yes, but he is dead. He has been dead for eight years. I don't remember him."
"Have you any brothers or sisters?"
"I have a little sister a year younger than I am. The other four are dead. They died long ago. I'm the only boy Mother had. Oh, I do so wish I was bigger and older! If I was I could do something to save the place—I'm sure I could. It is breaking Mother's heart to have to leave it."
"So she has to leave it, has she?" said Turner grimly, with the old hatred stirring in his heart.
"Yes. There is a mortgage on it and we're to be sold out very soon—so the lawyers told us. Mother has tried so hard to make the farm pay but she couldn't. I could if I was bigger—I know I could. If they would only wait a few years! But there is no use hoping for that. Mother cries all the time about it. She has lived at the Cove farm for over thirty years and she says she can't live away from it now. Elsie—that's my sister—and I do all we can to cheer her up, but we can't do much. Oh, if I was only a man!"
The lad shut his lips together—how much his mouth was like his father's—and looked out seaward with troubled blue eyes. Turner smiled another grim smile. Oh, Neil Jameson, your old score was being paid now!
Yet something embittered the sweetness of revenge. That boy's face—he could not hate it as he had accustomed himself to hate the memory of Neil Jameson and all connected with him.
"What was your mother's name before she married your father?" he demanded abruptly.
"Lisbeth Miller," answered the boy, still frowning seaward over his secret thoughts.
Turner started again. Lisbeth Miller! He might have known it. What woman in all the world save Lisbeth Miller could have given her son those eyes and curls? So Lisbeth had married Neil Jameson—little Lisbeth Miller, his schoolboy sweetheart. He had forgotten her—or thought he had; certainly he had not thought of her for years. But the memory of her came back now with a rush.