“Wasn’t he asking you something?” said Melian, as they spun over the railway bridge above the station. The town lay beneath and behind; an old church tower just glimpsed above tall bare elms.
“I dare say. But if we are going to get home before you get chilly, we can’t stop to answer all sorts of idiotic questions.”
Even then the reply struck Melian as odd, less so perhaps than the change in her kinsman’s manner while making it. But she said:
“Before I get chilly. Why I’m wrapped up like—Shackleton, or Peary, or any of them. In your coat too. It was quite wrong of you to have insisted upon my wearing it, and I had plenty of wraps.”
“Had you? As a prologue to our time together child, I may as well tell you I am a man of fads. One is that of being skipper in my own ship. You obeyed orders, so there’s no more to be said.”
It was put so kindly, so pleasantly. The tone was everything, and again the girl felt a lump rise to her throat, for it reminded her all of her dead father. Just the sort of thing he would have said; just the sort of tone in which he would have said it.