"I have never asked a thing of you before."
"But, Rebecca——"
"Will you come for Hortense's sake?" she interrupted, with a little sharp, hard, falsetto note in her baby voice.
"Rebecca," I demanded, "what do you mean?"
But she snapped back like the peevish child that she was: "An you come not when I ask you, you may stay!" And she had gone.
What was she trying to say with her dark hints and overnice scruples of a Puritan conscience? And was not that Jack Battle greeting her outside in the dark?
I tore after Rebecca at such speed that I had cannoned into open arms before I saw a hulking form across the way.
"Fall-back—fall-edge!" roared Jack, closing his arms about me. "'Tis Ramsay himself, with a sword like a butcher's cleaver and a wit like a broadaxe!"
"Have you not heard, Jack?"
"Heard! Ship ahoy!" cried Jack. "Split me to the chin like a cod! Stood I not abaft of you all day long, packed like a herring in a pickle! 'Twas a pretty kettle of fish in your Noah's ark to-day! 'Tis all along o' goodness gone stale from too much salt," says Jack.