"Well, what is it?"
"I want to talk to you about your sister."
The opportunity was too good to be missed; appealed irresistibly to the humorous side of the listener; frivolity gained the day. Dick's nature was such that happiness ever wanted to bubble up, and it was so long since he had felt inclined to give it a show. He emitted a groan; leaned back in the deck chair and thrust his hands into his pockets.
"I thought that," he said. "I guessed it! Existence aboard this lugger's going to be made a curse to me! I am going to have her drummed into my ears all the rest of the voyage."
"Dick!"
"Understand, Prince Charleigh, that I know her. Have known her for nearly one-and-twenty years. By your own showing, you have known her little more than a month. ... Very well, two months then. It's out of your power to present her in any light in which I haven't seen her. I know the colour of her eyes, hair and teeth; the tilt of her nose and the length of it; how she looks when she's doing this, and how she looks when she's doing that. You understand? I'm not going to be bored all day long with your two-months old description of her."
"My dear Dick!"
Masters could not help laughing. Concluded that it would be best to let the boy run on. Necessarily he must reach the end of his tether, and his own turn would come then, when, in the natural course of things, the other's exuberance had subsided.
"You may laugh! You're infected. The disease is coursing through your veins. But you're not going to make a victim of me. When you feel it coming on, you just go to the bows—there's never any one there—and rhapsodize to the ship's figurehead. Spare me."
"Dick!"