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The elder brother saw how easily Burt's jealousy could be aroused, and therefore denied himself many an hour of the young girl's society, although it caused him a strange little heartache to do so. But he was very observant, for Amy was becoming a deeply interesting study.
"I'll go with you," she assented, cordially, "and I cannot think of anything that would make my birthday more complete." "I'll be ready in an hour," he said, flushing with pleasure, and he went up to his room two steps at a time. Burt's mental processes during the past few weeks had been characteristic, and would have amused Amy had she been fully aware of them.
The glamour of yachting association might be made to cast a radiance about the event, in which the damnatory fact that the principal figure was a mere reporter could be thrown into low relief. Such is the view which journalistic snobbery takes of the general public's snobbery. "Whose yacht?" Again the spiteful little smile appealed on Burt's lips as he dashed the rising hope. "Fentriss Smith's."
Then I shouldn't be left alone evenings by the great inquiring mind of the family. Burt's going away, and, as his father says, has got into a scrape; so what's to become of me?" They all arose from the table amid general laughter, of which Webb and Burt were equally the objects, and on the faces of those not in the secret there was much perplexed curiosity.
"Doctors never pick at folks," he said to himself "at any rate, not old Dr. Burt's son." "I used to come here to see your mother," said the doctor, "when she was sick. She used to talk a great deal about you, and said she wanted me to get acquainted with you, when your time was out." Eph started, but said nothing.
And so the time flew in mutual confidences, and the past grew clear when illumined by love. "Poor old Webb!" said Amy, with a mingled sigh and laugh. "There you were growing as gaunt as a scarecrow, and I loving you all the time. What a little goose I was! If you had looked at Gertrude as Burt did I should have found myself out long ago. Why hadn't you the sense to employ Burt's tactics?"
Once that was accomplished, he meant to devote himself to proposing to the young lady, gaining her father's consent, and getting to sea again as soon as possible, making a good cruise at the whale fishery, and returning to Sydney within two years as master and owner of a ship of his own. Consequently, Burt's news gave him considerable disquietude.
At the same time, with her riper experience, she speedily divined his secret, to which Amy was blind. "He could almost say his prayers to Amy," she thought, as she returned after an evening spent at the Cliffords', "and she doesn't know it." With all his frankness, Burt's relations to Amy still baffled her.
"The kind of bees that Virgil wrote about were undoubtedly their ancestors," resumed Webb, smiling at Burt's sally, "for bees seem to change but little, if any, in their traits and habits. Centuries of domestication do not make them domestic, and your swarm, if not hived, would have gone to the mountains and lived in a hollow tree.
"Well," exclaimed Webb, "what am I to do? I can't stand up between you and drive." "Gertrude, you must clamber around and sustain Burt's drooping spirits." "Indeed, Amy, you must know best how to do that," was the reply. "As guest, I claim a little of the society of the commander-in-chief. You had it coming over." "I'll solve the vexed question," said Burt, much nettled, and leaping out.
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