Truly, I was touched. Tommy turned quickly away and blinked at the horizon. Yet neither of us knew that all of this time Doloria had been standing in the companionway door. She now crossed swiftly and sat by the weeping man, impulsively drawing his grizzled head to her shoulder as a mother might have comforted a hurt child. But toward me her face was turned, and I saw that her startled eyes spoke into mine the entreating message which distracted her—telling me that we must acknowledge this claim of Monsieur's poor heart before our own could ever be happy; asking me what to do, since his title to happiness came first. Yet all that her lips spoke was the trembling whisper:
"Oh, Jack!"
But he, with a new determination, sat quickly upright. The warmth of a woman's sympathetic arms upon a life that had been without comfort, the quick intuition that she was pleading for him at a great cost to herself, stirred the fineness of his nature, and he cried:
"Never! I have lived this long, and this long suffered, enough to know the irony of that royal barrier! Your aunt and I, dear child, are passing toward the shadows of life, while you and my boy Jack are just starting out. Your happiness shall not be cindered upon a false altar—I swear it!"
"Good old boy," Tommy murmured. "Do you mean that, honest?"
"Pardieu, have I not sworn it?"
"And you wouldn't try to muddy the water again if I confessed that our Marine Law was a hocus-pocus?"
"What is that hocus-pocus?"
"A no-such-a-thing."
"Sacré bleu! I see! Pipes and iron safes and hocus-pocus! But I do not care!" He turned to Doloria and, taking one of her hands, said: "You, mon ami, shall find your heart's best desire. It is I who say it!—I, who have the authority!" The way he clung to that authority was really pathetic.