[The Tides of Barnegat by F. Hopkinson Smith]@TWC D-Link book
The Tides of Barnegat

CHAPTER XII
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Often, as he looked into the lad's eyes brimming with fun, he would wish that he himself had been born with the same kind of temperament.

Then again the boy satisfied to a certain extent the longing in his heart for home, wife, and child--a void which he knew now would never be filled.

Fate had decreed that he and the woman he loved should live apart--with this he must be content.

Not that his disappointments had soured him; only that this ever-present sorrow had added to the cares of his life, and in later years had taken much of the spring and joyousness out of him.

This drew him all the closer to Archie, and the lad soon became his constant companion; sitting beside him in his gig, waiting for him at the doors of the fishermen's huts, or in the cabins of the poor on the outskirts of Barnegat and Warehold.
"There goes Doctor John of Barnegat and his curly-head," the neighbors would say; "when ye see one ye see t'other." Newcomers in Barnegat and Warehold thought Archie was his son, and would talk to the doctor about him: "Fine lad you got, doctor--don't look a bit like you, but maybe he will when he gets his growth." At which the doctor would laugh and pat the boy's head.
During all these years Lucy's letters came but seldom.


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