He had made an overture to its renewal in the book he lent her, and then Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter had appeared on deck, and borne down upon him when he was walking with Lottie Kenton and trying to begin his self-retrieval through her.  She had left him; but they had not, and in the bonds of a prophet and his followers he found himself bound with them for much more conversation than he had often held with them ashore.  The parochial duties of an ethical teacher were not strenuous, and Breckon had not been made to feel them so definitely before.  Mrs. Rasmith held that they now included promising to sit at her table for the rest of the voyage; but her daughter succeeded in releasing him from the obligation; and it was she who smilingly detached the clinging hold of the elder lady.  “We mustn’t keep Mr. Breckon from his friends, mother,” she said, brightly, and then he said he should like the pleasure of introducing them, and both of the ladies declared that they would be delighted.

He bowed himself off, and half the ship’s-length away he was aware, from meeting Lottie with her little Englishman, that it was she and not Ellen whom he was seeking.  As the couple paused in whirring past Breckon long enough to let Lottie make her hat fast against the wind, he heard the Englishman shout: 

“I say, that sister of yours is a fine girl, isn’t she?”

“She’s a pretty good—­looker,” Lottie answered back.  “What’s the matter with her sister?”

“Oh, I say!” her companion returned, in a transport with her slangy pertness, which Breckon could not altogether refuse to share.

He thought that he ought to condemn it, and he did condemn Mrs. Kenton for allowing it in one of her daughters, when he came up to her sitting beside another whom he felt inexpressibly incapable of it.  Mrs. Kenton could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters, like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he saw.  She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen, with her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest spirit in her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable to his sex as he could.  But this bold defence was as far from the poor lady as any spoken reproach was from him.  Her daughter had to check in her a mechanical offer to rise, as if to give Breckon her place, the theory and practice of Tuskingum being that their elders ought to leave young people alone together.

“Don’t go, momma,” Ellen whispered.  “I don’t want you to go.”