He reached up, and pulling her hand down, kissed it reverently. And then she said softly: “While my boy was little I guided him through the shoals, avoiding the rocks, and I longed,—oh, _how_ I longed to be always at the helm, to keep his boat in the still, deep waters. But I realized that it would be no kindness to have him depend on me alone for guidance. I would grow old,—my hand would lose its cunning, my eyes their keenness of vision,—or I would have to leave him altogether—”
He kissed her hand again, in protest. “Old age and death have nothing in common with my young mother,” he whispered.
She smiled sadly as she shook her head. “Nevertheless, one must always be prepared. At any rate, I taught you how to steer your own boat, my boy.”
“Then you desert the ship, do you, O most wise woman?” he asked gayly.
“I but abdicate the captaincy,” she replied in the same strain.
When he left the house to make his call, there was something in his bearing which would have convinced his mother, even without their previous conversation, that his decision was made and that he went to put his life in the hands of the one woman in the world she would have chosen for him. Her heart was light, for she had no doubt as to the outcome.
Mr. Spencer came in singing, “Hail to the chief who in triumph advances,” and then, seeing his sister, he stopped abruptly and said, “I told you so.”
“You think he has gone to put his fate ‘to the test, to win or lose it all?’”
“Did you see the set of his shoulders as he left the house?” demanded her brother, and then, without waiting for a reply, he continued: “You can’t fool me. I know the signs of the zodiac. It’s the full of the moon, that part of the month when it gets into a fellow’s blood, and he forgets everything except that here is the one being he loves. Why, Stella, I’d have been infected with that same fever every full moon for forty years, if I hadn’t been vaccinated.”
Mrs. Malloy laughed heartily, and then he said, more earnestly: “Robert will be a lucky man to win that girl. I’ve known her for so long, and have been so fond of her, that nothing but my age prevents my stepping in now and interfering with Robert. The first time I ever saw her,” he continued reminiscently, “she was a mere child, a quaint red-headed little thing, with a world of tragedy in her big eyes. That was a few months after she had lost her father. She had replied to a question of her aunt’s, simply ‘yes,’—and Mrs. Weston was striving to make her say ‘yes, ma’am.’”