"I declare for't," he said, scrambling back to the deck. "I 'most
forgot. I be'n so put about." He took Lydia's hand loosely into his
own, and bent forward to kiss her. She threw her arms round him, and
while he remained looking over her shoulder, with a face of grotesque
perplexity, and saying, "Don't cry, Lyddy, don't cry!" she pressed her
face tighter into his withered neck, and tried to muffle her homesick
sobs. The sympathies as well as the sensibilities often seem dulled by
age. They have both perhaps been wrought upon too much in the course
of the years, and can no longer respond to the appeal or distress
which they can only dimly realize; even the heart grows old. "Don't
you, don't you, Lyddy!" repeated the old man. "You mustn't. The
captain's waitin'; and the cars--well, every minute I lose makes it
riskier and riskier; and your aunt Maria, she's always so uneasy,
you know!"

The girl was not hurt by his anxiety about himself; she was more
anxious about him than about anything else. She quickly lifted her
head, and drying her eyes, kissed him, forcing her lips into the
smile that is more heart-breaking to see than weeping. She looked
over the side, as her grandfather was handed carefully down to a seat
by the two sailors in the boat, and the captain noted her resolute
counterfeit of cheerfulness. "That's right!" he shouted up to her.
"Just like my girls when their mother left 'em. But bless you, they
soon got over it, and so'll you. Give way, men," he said, in a lower
voice, and the boat shot from the ship's side toward the wharf. He
turned and waved his handkerchief to Lydia, and, stimulated apparently
by this, her grandfather felt in his pockets for his handkerchief; he
ended after a vain search by taking off his hat and waving that.

When he put it on again, it relapsed into that likeness of a half-shut