"I can't," said her father, simply. "There isn't a woman living, old or young, that could take my fancy away from the girl I won in Baltimo, after the wah. She's my love, the same now as then. You're pretty good-looking, Posey, so people seem to think. But your mother. Lord! She was a beauty, and as soft and gentle as an evenin' breeze."
"I sometimes wish I had her now, daddy. Since I've been eighteen, and everybody's so good to me, I mean. There are such lots of little things a mother could tell me. And to think I was the only child she kept—the very last of your family—and she couldn't have stayed with me! Ah! well, don't mind me, dad, I'm happy enough with you."
"You certainly don't often pull a long face, dearie. If there's anything troubling you, out with it, and let's see if I can't help."
"It's rather a big little secret, daddy. Maybe I oughtn't have kept it so long, but I was ashamed to tell, I reckon. You see nothing like this ever happened to me before."
The old man's faded eyes kindled with sudden fire. He halted her suddenly, facing seaward, and together they leaned over the taffrail.
"Posey, it hasn't got anything to do with John Glynn, has it?" he asked with a tremulous eagerness of joy.
"Yes, daddy."
"He spoke to you before we sailed?"
"Just before. That last evening, at the hotel, when you went off to smoke with the nice old gentleman you fought beside at Seven Pines, and left us sitting in the corridor looking at the people. He said everything that was nice about you, first; how you had been his father's dearest friend, and had helped him through college, and started him in New York, and he loved you dearly, and never could repay the debt. Then he recalled how he and I had known each other as boy and girl, though he always thought of me as nothing but a little kid, until he saw me last year at home, and just now, in New York. He told me how hard he was working, with scarcely a minute to call his own, and what a tough struggle it would be to get up top, but that he meant to do it, if he lived——"
"And he will—he will!" interrupted Mr. Winstanley, in accents of strong pride. "He didn't tell you, I'll bet, that he never took up my offer to stake him with funds for his expenses in New York, till he got square upon his feet, and that he never drew a blessed cent of it?"