“I don’t believe in your Victor, Frank. Look here, now: would you, Frank Hallock, leave your home, and go to work in that oil mill?” questioned Harry.
“Well, that is different. Maybe if I was off in Germany, and couldn’t get anything else to do, and must earn my bread some way, I should go into most any kind of a mill; but the fishing part I wouldn’t mind one bit. I wonder what has become of Kate?”
“Frank,” said Harry, “I’ve wanted to say something to you for a good many days now, but I hadn’t the courage. I thought it would be a right good time that Saturday when we laid planks across the marsh, but somehow every plank we got up from the beach made it harder, and I was a coward after all.”
“Out with it now, then; it’s foggy enough to hide your blushes.”
“It’s something you will not like to hear, Frank.”
“Out with it, I say, while your courage is up.”
“Well, then, I don’t think it was right in you to let Kate give you breakfast and dinner the day your father and mother went away.”
“It was one of the best turns Kate ever served me. I hope you haven’t been talking to her about it, and putting notions of right and wrong into her head, about it.”
“No; I haven’t talked with Kate, and I don’t believe the thought that she was deceiving her father ever entered her mind; but she was, all the same. And you let him think you had been kept on bread all day, when I know that Kate gave you her own breakfast, and was so afraid that somebody would find it out at home, that she went to Mrs. Dobson’s to get something to eat when she was hungry, and never once told that she had gone without her breakfast for you. And then she came home and gave you her dinner, too.”
“Yes,” said Frank, rising from his chair and peering through the fog, “Kate is a good deal of a friend of mine. I know perfectly well that if I should ask her to run off to sea with me to-morrow, she would cry a little and beg a good deal not to have me go, and then would go with me after all.”