it for millions.  You’ll learn law enough to look after your own property when I’m out o’ the light, and you’ll have to be solid with the best men in the market (they are useful later); and above all, you’ll have to stow away the plain, common, sit-down-with-your chin-on your-elbows book-learning.  Nothing pays like that, Harve, and it’s bound to pay more and more each year in our country—­in business and in politics.  You’ll see.”

“There’s no sugar in my end of the deal,” said Harvey.  “Four years at college!  ’Wish I’d chosen the valet and the yacht!”

“Never mind, my son,” Cheyne insisted.  “You’re investing your capital where it’ll bring in the best returns; and I guess you won’t find our property shrunk any when you’re ready to take hold.  Think it over, and let me know in the morning.  Hurry!  We’ll be late for supper!”

As this was a business talk, there was no need for Harvey to tell his mother about it; and Cheyne naturally took the same point of view.  But Mrs. Cheyne saw and feared, and was a little jealous.  Her boy, who rode rough-shod over her, was gone, and in his stead reigned a keen-faced youth, abnormally silent, who addressed most of his conversation to his father.  She understood it was business, and therefore a matter beyond her premises.  If she had any doubts, they were resolved when Cheyne went to Boston and brought back a new diamond marquise ring.

“What have you two been doing now?” she said, with a weak little smile, as she turned it in the light.

“Talking—­just talking, Mama; there’s nothing mean about Harvey.”

There was not.  The boy had made a treaty on his own account.  Railroads, he explained gravely, interested him as little as lumber, real estate, or mining.  What his soul yearned after was control of his father’s newly purchased sailing-ship.  If that could be promised him within what he conceived to be a reasonable time, he, for his part, guaranteed diligence and sobriety at college for four or five years.  In vacation he was to be allowed full access to all details connected with the line—­he had not asked more than two thousand questions about it,—­from his father’s most private papers in the safe to the tug in San Francisco harbour.

“It’s a deal,” said Cheyne at the last.  “You’ll alter your mind twenty times before you leave college, o’ course; but if you take hold of it in proper shape, and if you don’t tie it up before you’re twenty-three, I’ll make the thing over to you.  How’s that, Harve?”

“Nope; never pays to split up a going concern.  There’s too much competition in the world anyway, and Disko says ’blood-kin hev to stick together.’  His crowd never go back on him.  That’s one reason, he says, why they make such big fares.  Say, the ‘We’re Here’ goes off to the Georges on Monday.  They don’t stay long ashore, do they?”

“Well, we ought to be going, too, I guess.  I’ve left my business hung up at loose ends between two oceans, and it’s time to connect again.  I just hate to do it, though; haven’t had a holiday like this for twenty years.”