“You’re a very silly ignorant little girl, or you would understand that he has no business presuming to come to our house; and he knows it perfectly well. I want you to stop looking in that direction at once. I simply will not have him devouring you with his eyes in that way. I declare I would like to go back and tell him what I think of him. Starr, stop I tell you, Starr!” But the noise of the starting drowned her words, and Starr, her cheeks like roses and her eyes like two stars, was waving a bit of a handkerchief and smiling and throwing kisses. The kisses were for her father, but the smiles and the starry glances, and the waving bit of cambric were for Michael, and they all travelled through the air quite promiscuously, drenching the bright uncovered head of the boy with sweetness. His eyes gave her greeting and thanks and parting all in one in that brief moment of her passing: and her graceful form and dainty vivid face were graven on his memory in quick sweet blows of pain, as he realized that she was going from him. Slowly the great vessel glided out upon the bright waters and grew smaller and smaller. The crowd on the wharf were beginning to break away and hurry back to business or home or society. Still Michael stood with bared head gazing, and that illumined expression upon his face. Endicott, a mist upon his own glasses at parting from his beloved baby, saw the boy’s face as it were the face of an angel; and was half startled, turning away embarrassedly as though he had intruded upon a soul at prayer; then looked again. “Come, son!” he said almost huskily. “It’s over! We better be getting back. Step in.” The ride back to the office was a silent one. Somehow Endicott did not feel like talking. There had been some differences between himself and his wife that were annoying, and a strange belated regret that he had let Starr go away for a foreign education was eating into his heart. Michael, on his part, was living over again the passing of the vessel and the blessing of the parting. Back in the office, however, all was different. Among the familiar walls and gloomy desks and chairs Endicott was himself, and talked business. He put questions, short, sharp and in quick succession. “What are you doing with yourself? Working? What at? H’m! How’d you get there? Like it? Satisfied to do that all your life? You’re not? Well, what’s your line? Any ambitions? You ought to have got some notion in college of what you’re fit for. Have you thought what you’d like to do in the world?” Michael hesitated, then looked up with his clear, direct, challenging gaze. “There are two things,” he said, “I want to earn money and buy some land in the country, and I want to know about laws.” “Do you mean you want to be a lawyer?” “Yes.” “What makes you think you’d be a success as a lawyer?” “Oh, I might not be a success, but I need to know law, I want to try to stop some things that ought not to be.”