A few moments later she heard him on the veranda, talking with her oldest boy. “I’ll swim you a hundred yards in the bay and beat you,” he was saying to John in a youthfully challenging voice. “You’re on,” replied the fourteen-year-old, concisely. “Say, you can’t do it, though!” They moved away and their voices dwindled. Mary Vanton listened to the attenuating sound of their movements and chatter. A great thankfulness filled her heart, and when she rose from the chair where she had been sitting, motionless, tears were in her eyes. XII But Tom Lupton was not articulate. He walked beside Mary Vanton, sat at her table, declined cigars and apologetically lit his pipe instead, looked at his hostess and old friend with something kindling in his countenance, talked--the casual talk that there was to exchange in cheerful barter--and said nothing of what was in his heart. Yet Mary Vanton knew what was there. The same thing was there that had been in the heart of the youngster, the boy, Tommy Lupton, she had known. It would be there always. But his attitude was different from Richard Hand’s. In spite of an existence that gave him plenty of opportunity for thinking things out there were things that Tommy never would think out. He would only dumbly feel. If he couldn’t think them out he certainly couldn’t utter them in words. Without doubt he thought it wrong to feel them. All his life he had loved Mary Vanton just as, in a boyish way, he had loved the girl Mermaid. But he did not realize it; would have thought it a wicked thing in him if he had realized it. His attitude was simple. Mary developed it one day and defined it for her own satisfaction--developed and defined it for his unconscious satisfaction, too. He would feel the better for it, she knew, though he would not know why. “What,” she asked him as they were walking along the ocean shore together, “are you going to do--eventually?” Tom Lupton considered. “Oh, I suppose I shall just stick along here,” he confessed. “It isn’t much. It’s all I have to look forward to. “Other men,” he said, a moment later, “haven’t any special thing to look forward to, either. Take the fellows at the station. All the older ones are married and expect to retire on their pensions some day and take it easy. They’ve children. They can watch them grow up. I’m not married. I’ll probably stay in the harness as long as I’m able and then I’ll have to quit, I suppose, whether I want to or not. I can watch other people’s children growing up. I can occupy myself some way. That’s what it comes to mostly--occupying yourself some way--doesn’t it?” “Why don’t you marry?” If it was a cruelty he was mercifully unconscious of it. He looked straight at her and replied: “I’ve never thought of marrying.”