She said nothing to any one of these musings, but she ventured one day to ask Mr. Easterfield how Mr. Hemphill was faring.  His reply was only half satisfactory.  He reported the young man as doing very well, and being well; he was growing fat, and that did not improve his looks; and he was getting more and more taciturn and self-absorbed.  “Why was he taciturn?” Olive asked herself.  “Was he brooding and melancholy?” She did not know anything about the fat, and what might be its primal cause; but her mind was not set at ease about him.

Things went on quietly and pleasantly at the toll-gate, and at Broadstone.  Dick came down as often as he could and spent a day or two (usually including a Sunday) with Olive and her uncle.  It was now October, and colleges were in full tide.  It was also the hunting season, and that meant that Mr. Tom would be at Broadstone for a couple of weeks, and Mrs. Easterfield said she must have Olive at that time.  And, in order to make the house lively, she invited Lieutenant Asher and his wife at the same time, as Olive and her young stepmother were now very good friends.  Then the captain invited his old friend Captain Lancaster, Dick’s father, to visit him at the toll-gate.

These were bright days for these old shipmates; and, strange to say, as they sat and puffed, they did not talk so much of things that had been, as they puffed and made plans of things which were to be.  And these plans always concerned the niece of one, and the son of the other.  Captain Asher was not at all satisfied with Dick’s position in the college.  He could not see how eminence awaited any young man who taught theories; he would like Dick’s future to depend on facts.

“Two and two make four,” said he; “there is no need of any theory about that, and that’s the sort of thing that suits me.”

Captain Lancaster smiled.  He was a dry old salt, and listened more than he talked.

“Just now,” he remarked, “I guess Dick will stick to his theories, and for a while he won’t be apt to give his mind to mathematics very much, except to that kind of figuring which makes him understand that one and one makes one.”

There was a thing the two old mates were agreed upon.  No matter-what Dick’s position might be in the college, his salary should be as large as that of any other professor.  They could do it, and they would do it.  They liked the idea, and they shook hands over it.

Olive was greatly pleased with Captain Lancaster.  “There is the scent of the sea about him,” she wrote to Dick, “as there is about Uncle John and father, but it is different.  It is constant and fixed, like the smell of salt mackerel.  He would never keep a toll-gate; nor would he marry a young wife.  Not that I object to either of these things, for if the one had not happened I would never have known you; and if the other had not happened, I might not have become engaged to you.”

The two captains dined at Broadstone while Olive was there, and Captain Lancaster highly approved of Mrs. Easterfield.  All seafaring men did—­as well as most other men.