She was in the wrong of it. She had cheated, the other children told him; but she was his own and they were aliens; and as he good-naturedly sent them home and led her into the house, comforting her with candy and cakes hidden in his pockets, the swift and sudden conviction came upon him that this charge of his youth was to be the wife of his manhood.
The conviction had grown and deepened, but he would not tell her about it just now. It was a story that would keep. He would rather make sure of a time when she would not laugh at him, and just now a doubt hung over her conduct.
Therefore he would not answer her, and her volatile mind went off to another subject. “’Steban, do you look most like your father or your mother?”
“My mother,” he said, briefly.
“I should like to have seen her,” said Nina, gazing pensively at the lamp. “She was a fair, no, a dark young thing, that an English skipper fell in love with when his vessel was in a Spanish port. He did not even know her language. They made signs, I suppose. After three short weeks’ acquaintance they were married, and she ran away to sea with him. He brought her to England to a dear little cottage by the sea. There they lived, and there one son was born to them.”
“Whom the foreign mother used to thrash within an inch of his life,” interposed Captain Fordyce, grimly.
Nina tried to suppress a laugh. In vain,—it broke out clear and distinct. “Oh, ’Steban,” she gasped, “it is too absurd! Whenever I hear any one talking of that exquisite thing, mother-love, I think of you. But”—and she became grave again—“perhaps she could not help it. I can imagine that you might have been—well, just a trifle provoking at times.”
“She should not have beaten me so much,” he said, stubbornly.
“My dear boy,” said Nina, caressingly, “don’t forget that her husband’s death and being among strangers soured her temper: and you must have liked her a little. You were sorry when she died, were you not?”
To her surprise, he vouchsafed no answer to this question. “You have the real John Bull prejudice against ‘furriners,’” she said, jestingly. “How is it that you endure me? I am virtually an American.”