"Mr. Jason is expecting you," said Peggy. "Will you be so good as to wait?"
Crouch regarded Peggy. The girl--whose own custom it was to look people straight in the face--found the penetrating and unflinching stare of Captain Crouch a somewhat trying ordeal.
"You're a well-spoken lass," said he, at last, "and well looking, too. Come, stay there a bit," he added, seeing that Peggy made as if to go; "stay there a bit, my girl. I'll polish up the glass eye, and have a better look at you."
And at that, to Peggy's horror and consternation, Crouch slipped out his glass eye, threw it up in the air and caught it, as though it had been a marble, and then proceeded to polish it violently on the shiny sleeve of his coat.
That done, he put it back again in the socket, and looked at Peggy even harder than before.
"Seems fair," said he. "You're a lass after my own heart; neat, trim and ship-shape. I've half a mind to adopt you."
Peggy could not restrain a smile.
"I don't know," she said, "that I ever exactly wished to be adopted."
Crouch looked thoroughly amazed.
"Why, my girl," said he, quite slowly, shaking his head in a doleful manner, "you've no right notion what kind of man I am. I could tell you stories that would make that curly hair of yours stand right up on end, like the bristles on the neck of a pig. And maybe, some day, p'raps, you'd learn to love me--like a father."