it of Maurice's?" he said to himself. "Does he
think every one that looks at his scarecrow of a daughter--" But there he
had need to acknowledge to himself his injustice to Miss Frarnie, a modest
maiden who had more cause to complain of him than he of her, since he had
done his best to please her, and her only fault lay in being pleased so
easily. She was pleased with him: he understood that now, though his
endeavors to enlist her had been for a very different manifestation of
interest. Perhaps it flattered him a little: he paused long enough to
consider what sort of a lot it would be if he really had been plighted to
Frarnie instead of Louie. Love and all that nonsense, he had heard say,
changed presently into a quiet sort of contentment; and if that were so,
it would be all the same at the end of a few years which one he took. He
felt that Frarnie was not very sympathetic, that her large white face
seldom sparkled with much intelligence, that she would make but a dull
companion; but, for all that, she would be, he knew, an excellent
housewife: she would bring a house with her too; and when a man is
married, and has half a dozen children tumbling round him, there is
entertainment enough for him, and it is another bond between him and the
wife he did not love too well at first; and if she were his, his would be
the Sabrina also, and when the Sabrina's days were over perhaps a great
East Indiaman, and with that the respect and deference of all his
townsmen: court would be paid to him, his words would be words of weight,
he would have a voice in the selection of town-officers, he would roll up
money in the bank, and some day he should be master of the great Maurice
mansion and the gardens and grapehouses. It was a brilliant picture to
him, doubtless, but in some way the recollection of two barelegged little
children digging clams down on the flats when the tide was out, with the
great white lighthouse watching them across the deserted stretches of the
long bent eel-grass, rose suddenly and wiped the other picture out, and he
saw the wind blowing in Louie's brown and silken hair and kissing the
color on her cheeks; he saw the shy sparkle of her downcast eyes, lovely
and brown then as they were now; and as he stood erect at last, snapping
his fingers defiantly, he felt that he had bidden Mr. Maurice's ships and
stocks and houses and daughter go hang, and had made his choice rather to
walk with Louie on his arm than as master