"How can we thank you," Mr Goldsworthy murmured emotionally, for he
also understood. "It is too, too--"

"It's all right, pater," the remarkable boy silenced him. "Aunt Deborah
knows how we feel about it."

Mary sat in stolid silence, for once indifferent to her
husband's dumb command; then tears welled into her tired eyes. She
pocketed her pride for her child's sake. It had been her hopeless
longing for years to give her darling's splendid abilities full scope.

"He will repay you, Debbie," she said.

"Ah, don't be so grudging--so ungenerous!" cried Deb.

Tea and cakes were brought in, and Bob, as he was thenceforth to be
styled, waited upon his aunt in the correctest manner. He had by this
time taken on an air that seemed to say: "You and I understand the
ropes; you must excuse these poor parents of mine, who were not born
with our perceptions." And Deb, no more proof against this sort of
thing than meaner mortals, had a feeling of special proprietorship in
him which she found pleasant, although he was not exactly the
heir-on-probation that she could have wished; which, of course, it
would have been preposterous to expect in a son of Bennet
Goldsworthy's. Bennet Goldsworthy accompanied her to the gate when she
went away, forbidding Mary to expose herself, hatless, to the wind. And
there the benevolent aunt's "intentions" were more distinctly
formulated.