moment from flirtation, and was
luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat. She had already
attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more. She kept moving
herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing
now this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer
she had secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as
she turned.

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal
pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a
disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he
joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of
seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot
leaving the ship. He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the
boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held
her from the ship's side with their oars; in the offing lay the white
steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other
times. The Norumbia's screws turned again under half a head of steam;
the pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and
caught the bundle of letters tossed after him. Then his men let go the
line that was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer's
departure was finally closed. It had been dramatically heightened
perhaps by her final impatience to be off at some added risks to the
pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and March smiled to think how
men whose lives are all of dangerous chances seem always to take as many
of them as they can.

He heard a girl's fresh voice saying at his shoulder, "Well, now we are
off; and I suppose you're glad, papa!"

"I'm glad we're not taking the pilot on, at least," answered the elderly
man whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father and
daughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him.
He wondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating
the beauty of the ship's passengers: he saw now that she was not only
extremely pretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even
had distinction. He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same
time of reproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance
and not very successful denial in her father's; and he went back with
these impressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the
ship had stopped.

She had not noticed the