"We mustn't keep Mr. Breckon from his friends,
mother," she said, brightly, and then he said he should like the
pleasure of introducing them, and both of the ladies declared that they
would be delighted.

He bowed himself off, and half the ship's-length away he was aware, from
meeting Lottie with her little Englishman, that it was she and not Ellen
whom he was seeking. As the couple paused in whirring past Breckon long
enough to let Lottie make her hat fast against the wind, he heard the
Englishman shout:

"I say, that sister of yours is a fine girl, isn't she?"

"She's a pretty good--looker," Lottie answered back. "What's the matter
with HER sister?"

"Oh, I say!" her companion returned, in a transport with her slangy
pertness, which Breckon could not altogether refuse to share.

He thought that he ought to condemn it, and he did condemn Mrs. Kenton
for allowing it in one of her daughters, when he came up to her sitting
beside another whom he felt inexpressibly incapable of it. Mrs. Kenton
could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters,
like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made
them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he
saw. She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had
the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen,
with her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest
spirit in her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable
to his sex as he could. But this bold defence was as far from the poor
lady as any spoken reproach was from him. Her daughter had to check in
her a mechanical offer to rise, as if to give Breckon her place, the
theory and practice of Tuskingum being that their elders ought to leave
young people alone together.

"Don't go, momma," Ellen whispered. "I don't want you to go."

Breckon, when he arrived before them, remained talking on foot, and,
unlike Lottie's company, he talked to the mother. This had happened
before from him, but she had not got used to it, and now she deprecated
in everything but words his polite questions about her sufferings from
the rough weather, and his rejoicing that the worst was probably over.
She ventured the hope that it was so, for she said that Mr. Kenton had
about decided to keep on to Holland, and it seemed to her that they had
had enough of storms. He said he was glad that they were going right on;
and then sh