So admonished the servant bowed low and left the room, as his master turned again to the piano and began to make the room ring with a furious and warlike march.
IV.
The United States is famous for its beautiful women, but even in that country where beauty is the common heritage of her daughters, Lucy Dunlap’s loveliness of face and figure shone as some transcendent planet in the bright heavens of femininity where all are stars.
“How can you be so cruel, Jack, as to run away to sea again so soon and when I need you so much?”
The great hazel eyes looked so pleadingly into poor Jack’s that he could not even stammer out an excuse for his departure.
Sailors possibly appreciate women more than all other classes of men. They are so much without their society that they never seem to regard them as landsmen do, and Lucy Dunlap was an exceptional example of womankind to even the most blase landsman. Small wonder then that sailor Jack, confused, could only gaze at the lovely being before him.
Lucy Dunlap, though of the average height of women, seemed taller, so round, supple and elastic were the proportions of her perfect figure. The charm of intellectual power gave added beauty to a face whose features would have caused an artist to realize that the ideal model did not exist alone in the land of dreams.
In the spacious drawing-room of Dunlap’s mansion were gathered those who had enjoyed the sumptuous dinner served that evening in honor of their seafaring kinsman. Mr. John Dunlap was relating his experiences in Port au Prince to his old friend, Mrs. Church, while his brother, with that old-fashioned courtliness that became him so well, was playing the cavalier to Miss Winthrop, one of his granddaughter’s pretty friends. Walter Burton was bending over Miss Stanhope, a talented young musician, who, seated before the piano, was scanning a new piece of music.