CHAPTER XXXII
THE mother and son did share with Nathan, however, the deception he was playing upon the vague creature in the gray and lavender waiting for him back there in the east; and the device by which his letters to her should bear the postmark of foreign ports which the "Ellen T. Robinson" might likely enough visit in her wanderings. It had, in fact, been Robert Barton himself who had first put the idea into the sailor's head of remaining in San Francisco, and making of himself a fit companion for the fine young lady who had married him.
Robert Barton, during those first long days, when he lay upon the deck of the "Ellen T. Robinson," and read outloud for hours with Nathan, and talked with him for hours afterward, discovered under the crude exterior an appreciation of beauty of words, a fineness, a delicacy of feeling, that had something of the spark of divine fire in it. Robert Barton had left Boston tired, and bored, and ambitionless. He had arrived in San Francisco, refreshed, and interested, and possessed of an eager desire to see what he could make of the big sailor-boy.
The clergyman had friends in San Francisco, and an uncle and aunt were expecting him to spend some months with them. But he preferred to live closer to his new interest. He and Nathan roomed at the same place during their first months in San Francisco, ate at the same restaurants, went to many of the same
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