s and
balls--"

I broke off to kiss away a tear, and a little later she was smiling
with her hand in mine, as I led her up on deck.

The mistiness had gone out of the sunlight, the pearly, vaporous
curls--faint of hue as the new moon beheld in the day--which had given
a look of marble to the sky, had melted out or been settled by the
breeze over to the English coast, and now the heavens were a pale blue,
piebald with bodies of white vapour streaming up out of the south and
touching the green and creaming stretch of waters with shadows of
violet. There was more warmth in the sun than I should have looked for
at that time of the year, and I speedily made Grace comfortable in a
chair, a little distance from the tiller--in other words, out of
earshot of the helmsman; I snugged her in rugs, and Caudel further
sheltered her by what he called a hurricane house--a square of canvas
"seized" above the line of the bulwark rail.

She gazed about her out of the wraps which rose to her ears with eyes
full of childlike interest and wonder, not unmixed with fear, I saw her
eagerly watching the action of the yacht as the little fabric leaned to
a sea with a long, sideways, floating plunge that brought the yeast of
the broken waters bubbling and hissing to the very line of her lee
forecastle bulwark; then she would clasp my hand as though startled
when the dandy craft brought the weight of her white canvas to windward
on the heave of the underrunning sea with a sound as of drums and
bugles heard afar echoing down out of the glistening concavities and
ringing out of the taut rigging upon which the blue and brilliant
morning breeze was splitting.

She had not been sitting long before I saw that she was beginning to
like it. There was no nausea now; her eyes were bright, there was
colour in her cheeks; and her red lips lay parted as though in pure
enjoyment of the glad rush of the salt breeze athwart her teeth of
pearl.

We had a deal to say to each other as you may suppose, and so much of
the nonsense that lovers will utter went to our talk that I should be
sorry to record what was said. Caudel, conning the little ship, hung
about removed from us, but I would often catch his sea-blue eye
furtively directed at Grace as though he could not look at her often
enough. The boy Bobby came and went betwixt the forecastle hatch and
the companion; the fellow at the helm swung upon the tiller with an
occasional peep at the broad wake racin