“Oh, look here, father!” Kit cried; “are you going to begin on that too! Look at Vieve; nobody stuck to you tighter than Vieve. You don’t know how she used to encourage us when we were inclined to give you up.” And he told for the first time how Vieve had sent him one of her two dollars when he went to New York, and how he had been robbed of the stamps.
“Genevieve, come here to your father!” Mr. Silburn said, in a tone of mock severity. And he put his arm around her to lift her to his knee as he used to do, but found that was a task that required both hands. Fathers are so slow to see it when their daughters grow into young women; it takes the sons of other fathers to make that discovery.
“Why!” he exclaimed, “you’re as heavy as a kedge anchor, and bigger than your mother. And you sent one of your dollars to Kit, did you? Now if I was half a father, I’d have handfuls of gold to shower over you on coming back from the sea, wouldn’t I? And the fact is I haven’t a cent but a little money that Kit made me put in my clothes—the clothes that he bought me, too. He—”
“Oh, Vieve has turned miser since you went away,” Kit interrupted, fearing that his father might go back to the old subject. “She wouldn’t spend a cent for fear we might not have enough money to get you home. She wants a rich husband, too. She has her eye on a cardinal that I met over in—”
Of course Vieve would not let him finish the sentence; and in the midst of the playful quarrel she was called to help her mother with dinner; and if any one should ask just how the reunited family spent that first day, not one of them could give anything like an exact account.
After a few days Vieve declared that the family reminded her of three kittens, so pleased with everything that they sat around the fire purring.
“You’d better enjoy it while you can,” her father answered. “Kit will soon have to be going back to his ship; and for my part, I’m not going to sit here the rest of my life doing nothing. You needn’t think it. It’s just the time for a man to go to sea again, after being shipwrecked; lightning don’t strike twice in the same place, you know.”
“Oh, Christopher!” Mrs. Silburn exclaimed. “You wouldn’t think of going to sea again, would you?”
“I’ve got to do something,” he answered, “and navigation don’t go very well on shore. But no more long voyages, likely. Maybe you’ve forgotten what I told you before I went away about a firm in Bridgeport that wanted me to take charge of a schooner line between there and New York? You see my memory works all smooth now, don’t it? Well, if they’re still of the same mind, I may do some business with them. You’re not going to lay me away on the shelf yet awhile, anyhow.”
“Oh, then I’d have a chance to go to New York with you some time!” Vieve cried. “You know I’ve never been there yet.”