"Not at all; she's a good boat, I can see," he said.
Nell took up the oars, but she had to pull only a few strokes, for the wind soon filled the sail, and the Annie Laurie, as if piqued by the things that had been said of her, sprang forward before the wind.
Nell shipped the oars, looked up at the sail, and glanced at Vernon, who had taken his seat in the stern, and got hold of the tiller with an accustomed air.
"Make for the Head," she said. "I'll get the lines ready."
There was silence for a minute or two while she baited the lines and paid them out, and Vernon watched her with a kind of absent-minded interest.
She was quite intent on her work, and he felt that, so far as she was concerned, he might have been old Brownie, or the rheumatic Willy, or her brother Dick; and something in her girlish indifference to his presence and personality impressed him; for Drake, Viscount Selbie, was not accustomed to be passed over as a nonentity by the women in whose company he chanced to be.
"That ought to fetch them," she said, eying the baited line with an air of satisfaction. "You might keep her to the wind a little more, Mr. Vernon; she can carry all we've got, and more."
"Aye, aye!" he responded, in sailor fashion. "You only did her bare justice, Miss Lorton," he added. "She's a good boat."
Nell looked round at him with a gratified smile.
"She's a dear old thing, really," she said; "and she behaves like an angel in a gale. Many's the time Dick and I have sailed her when half the other boats were afraid to leave the harbor."