My dear Thomas, you quite misunderstand me. I asked for nothing, except that I might take Mamma some day for a drive through their park. I hope I know how to behave better than that. Another thing, too: Miss Propert has been there twice, once to tea and once to lunch. I hope she will not have her head turned, for it seems that she did not take her meals in the housekeepers room, but upstairs. But that is none of my business: I am sure Lady Inverbroom may give her lunch on the top of the church-steeple if she wishes, and I said very distinctly that I had always found her a very well-behaved young woman, and mentioned nothing about her bouncing in in the middle of my dinner-party, nor when she spent Sunday morning in your library. Bygones are bygones. Thats what I always say, and act on, too.
ONE:When the pile was in one great flame we rode to the dwelling, and the girl was sent in to bid old Lucius begone. The doors stood open, a soft firelight shone from his room. We saw her form darken his chamber threshold and halt, and then she wailed: "Oh, Lawd God A'mighty! Oh, Lawd God A'mighty!"
The table at which she worked was covered with small cardboard slips, bearing in her neat minute handwriting the titles and the authors of the books in Mr Keelings library. Each appeared twice, once under its author, once under its title, and these she was sorting out into an alphabetical file from which she would compile her catalogue. She had been at work on it for about a fortnight, and the faint hopes she had originally entertained of getting it finished by the end of the year had now completely vanished. He had been{129} buying books in very large numbers; already wing-bookcases had begun to invade the floor space of his room, and he intended in the spring to build out farther into the garden. But Norah was not at all sure that she regretted the vanishing of those hopes: the work interested her, and she had the true book-lovers pride in making all the equipment connected with books as perfect as it could be. Three times a week she went with her brother after supper for a couple of hours work in Mr Keelings library: the other evenings she brought into order at home the collection of slips she had made there."I went to sea from New Bedford when I was twelve years old, and kept at whaling for near on to twenty-seven years. From cabin-boy, I crept up through all the ranks, till I became captain and part owner, and it was a good deal of satisfaction to me to be boss of a ship, I can tell you. When I thought I had had enough of it I retired, and bought a small farm. I stocked and ran it after my own fashion, called one of my oxen[Pg 60] 'Port' and the other 'Starboard,' had a little mound like my old quarter-deck built in my garden, and used to go there to take my walks. I had a mast with cross-trees fixed in this mound, and used to go up there, and stay for hours, and call out 'There she blows!' whenever I saw a bird fly by, or anything moving anywhere. I slept in a hammock under a tent, and when I got real nervous I had one of my farm-hands rock me to sleep in the hammock, and throw buckets of water against the sides of the tent, so's I could imagine I was on the sea again. But 'twasn't no use, and I couldn't cure myself of wanting to be on blue water once more. So I left my farm in my wife's hands, and am going out to Shanghai to command a ship whose captain died at Hong-Kong five months ago.Arthur was startled back to common sense. "They don't," he whispered, as they held one another in trembling arms. "If they did they would be like us.""It's a very simple matter," said Captain B, "when you know about it. The fact is, that we were once very near losing our lives by Chinese pirates, and we don't propose to have another risk like it."