me,--I was the last,--and we were all such everlastingly
lively young ones, and ma was so strict! Pa was away most of the time
getting a living. My pa, you know, was a pilot. It wasn't a fat living
for so many of us, but that wouldn't have mattered long as we had enough
to eat. But ma, poor soul, because of that twist her mind had taken
through sorrow, was always seeing something wrong in everything we did;
she never could be quiet or contented. The boys didn't get so much of
it: they were off out of doors and later at their trades; but me, I was
kept in to help with the housework, and kept in for company, and kept in
for no other reason, I guess, than because my wicked heart longed so to
go out and play with the girls and boys. I dare say it was good for me.
Ma meant all right, that I know, but ma was all along a sick woman. We
realized later that though she was round and about, busy every minute,
she was sick for years with the trouble that finally took her away. I
don't want you to think I didn't have a real good mother, for I did--a
first-rate mother who did her honest best to make a good woman of me."

"I know, I know." By a reminding pressure of her hands he begged she
would trust him not to misunderstand.

"But my pa--you should have known my pa!" Aurora's face brightened
immensely, and Gerald suspected that it was like him she looked when she
screwed her lips to one side in a manner humorously suggesting a pipe at
the corner of her mouth, and said in a voice not her own, "Golly, Nell,
can't you whistle for a snifter?" He could almost see a sailor's
chin-whiskers.

"He took me with him once in a while. Golly, those were good times, if
you please! Free as air, all the peanuts I could eat, out in the boat
with my pa, and catch fish, and catch a steamer if we could. We had an 8
big as a house on our sail. He was as good a seaman, my pa was, as any
in East Boston, but he wasn't a hustler. But there, if he'd been a
hustler, he wouldn't have been my pa. Wouldn't for a house with a
brownstone front have had my pa any different from what he was. Grandma
was just the same sort, God bless her! easy-going, jolly, come a day, go
a day, do as she please and let you do as you please. I used to have
such lovely times at her house, summers, down on the Cape, before my
sister died!

"It was there I first knew Hattie--Estelle. Her aunt's house was next to
my grandma's. I used to think her the luckiest child that ever was born.