“And, Frank,” she confessed one day, “he kisses it!  I know by the dullness on the glass when I rub it.”  She did not add that she rubbed it viciously.  “I tell you,” she insisted, almost with a groan, “he lives with her.  She is with him in this house in spite of us; she talks with him; his real existence is with her.  He comes out of it to make himself pleasant to us, but he goes back and tells her his secrets.”

“Nonsense, Laura,” Mr. Frank interrupted testily.  “For some reason or other the boy is getting on your nerves.  It is natural, after all.”

“Natural?  Yes, I see:  you mean that I’m an old maid, and it’s a case of crabbed age and youth.”

“My dear Laura, I mean nothing so rude.  But, after all, we have been living here a great many years and it is a change.”

“Frank, you can be singularly dense at times.  Must I tell you in so many words that I am fond of the boy, and if he’d be only as fond of me he might racket the house down and I’d only like him the better for it?”

Mr. Frank rubbed his head, and then with sudden resolution marched out of the house in search of Victor.  He found the boy on the roof removing a patent cowl which the local mason had set up a week before to cure the smoky chimney.

“My dear fellow,” the father cried up, “you’ll break your neck!  Come down at once—­I have something particular to say to you.”

Victor descended with the cowl under his arm.  “Do be careful. . . .  Doesn’t it make you giddy, clambering about in places like that?” Mr. Frank had no head at all for a height.

“Not a bit. . . .  Just look at this silly contrivance—­choked with soot in three days!  The fellow who invented it ought to have his head examined.”

“It has made you in a horrible mess,” said his father, who took no interest in cowls, but lost his temper in a smoky house.

“I’ll run in and have a change and wash.”

“No; put the nasty thing down and come into the garden.”  He opened the gate, and Victor followed, after dipping his hands in the waterfall.

“The fact is, my boy, I’ve come to a decision.  This has been a pleasant time—­a very pleasant time—­for all of us.  We have put off speaking to you about this, but I hope you understand that this is to be your home henceforward; that we wish it and shall be the happier for having you . . .”

Victor had been gazing out over the cove, but now turned and met his father’s eyes frankly.  “I have a little money,” he said.  “Mother managed to put by a small sum from time to time, enough to start me in life.  She did not tell me until a few days before she died:  she knew I wanted to be an engineer.”

He said this quite simply.  It was the first time he had mentioned his mother.  Mr. Frank felt his face flushing.