The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview with his wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung convalescently along the promenade on their steamer-chairs. These, so far as they were women, were of such sick plainness that when he came to Ellen his heart throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother’s aspersion of her health and beauty. She looked not only very well, and very pretty, but in a gay red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her father’s uncritical eyes, very stylish. The glow left his heart at eight of the empty seat beside her.
“Where is Lottie?” he asked, though it was not Lottie’s whereabouts that interested him.
“Oh, she’s walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere,” said Ellen.
“Then she’s made up her mind to tolerate him, has she?” the father asked, more lightly than he felt.
Ellen smiled. “That wasn’t anything very serious, I guess. At any rate, she’s walking with him.”
“What book is that?” he asked, of the volume she was tilting back and forth under her hand.
She showed it. “One of his. He brought it up to amuse me, he said.”
“While he was amusing himself with Lottie,” thought the judge, in his jealousy for her. “It is going the same old way. Well!” What he said aloud was, “And is it amusing you?”
“I haven’t looked at it yet,” said the girl. “It’s amusing enough to watch the sea. Oh, poppa! I never thought I should care so much for it.”
“And you’re glad we came?”