“Oh, oh,” gurgled Marjorie. What a nice old man was this Mr. Adrian Ducie! Her blithe young eyes were liquid and brilliant with expectation.
“You dreamed that you and I went hunting, with some others who don’t matter and who shall be nameless,” he glanced slightingly up and down the row of passengers at the table. “We went ashore in the yawl, and I borrowed the Captain’s rifle, and——”
“No, you didn’t,” said the Captain, from the next table, “for I haven’t got one.”
“You don’t mean it?” said Ducie, stopping short. “Then what would become of us if pirates should board this gallant craft of ours? Depend wholly on the pistol pockets of the passengers?”
“Oh, oh, Mr. Ducie,” cried Marjorie, quite losing her hold on herself, “you are so funny!”
“Thank you, oh, very much, I can be funnier than that when I try.”
Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s unseeing eyes perceived no interest apparently in this conversation. Now and then, with an absorbed air, she recurred to her tea and toast as if naught were going forward, while her husband ate his breakfast as silently and with as much gruff concentration as a hound with a bone.
Their persistent expression of a lack of interest seemed to stimulate Mr. Ducie to a further absorption of the attention of the company. “Are there really no shot-guns, no fowling-pieces aboard, nothing to shoot with deadlier than the darts of Miss Marjorie’s bright eyes?”
“Oh, oh,” she squealed, enchanted at this turn, and laid down her knife and fork to put her hands before her lips apparently to suppress a series of similar shrillnesses, for this old man’s funniness was of a most captivating order.
“I notice that there is a swamper’s cabin over there on the bank; I’ll bet he has got a rifle; but what is the nearest plantation house, Captain? Mansion, I should say,” he corrected the phrase with the satiric flout of the younger generation at the mannerisms of yore.