had to teach, for in the former case there was no question of betraying a miraculously gifted aunt.
It was with some such inventory as this, though the realization of it was present to him in the nebular form of feeling rather than the precision of formulated thought, that Paul accounted for his nonchalance in the face of bloody oaths and smutty stories, and he breathed deep draughts of his freedom as he sat in the bows of the barque and gazed far out at the horizon. When his mind went back to the life he was forswearing, it went straight to the little village, without pausing in the painful city. He pictured Aunt Verona's twisted smile and kind eyes. He saw the glass monuments flashing at Becky's ears, and heard her unearthly growlings give place to the cadences of "Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, a long wa-ays from ho-o-ome"—Becky whose bursts of song were more musical to the inch than Miss Todd's Ave Maria's to the yard—poor gurgling Gertrude who called him "Paul dear."
He wistfully recalled the night when he had stolen roses from the Ashmill gardens and kept a bud for Phœbe Meddar. His tenderness toward Phœbe had in no wise suffered at the hands of the boy who outmanœuvred him. Phœbe burying her straight little nose in Walter's bouquet was as precious to him as Phœbe in any other pretty pose. For that matter he earnestly guessed she had loved the blossoms because they were lovely, not because Walter had given them to her.
And Gritty—vulgar, loyal, tigerish, inimitable Gritty! She had got the letter before this, and all Hale's Turning must have heard. Dr. Wilcove might even at this moment be holding a pow-wow with the head master while he, Paul Minas, alias Paul Laval, was—according to the second mate—"somewheres about the same latitude as Baltimore." Rather rough on old boy Wilcove—but he would soon forget about his troublesome ward and pass
