He drifted off into a brown study, thinking hard in this manner.
"I wonder what Josephine would say if she could see me now? Is all our difference of rank but a matter of uniform? By Jove! I forgot all about her. I don't believe I've thought of her since I left them; yet, if the novels are right, I should have been thinking of her when I stood on the deck of the yacht expecting every moment would be my last. I was thinking of that girl in the boat, though. Wasn't she splendid? Plucky, pretty—well! Gracious me, Richard Revere, at the age of twenty-four you are surely not going to fall in love with the first woman you see, especially since you have been engaged to Josephine Remington pretty much ever since you were born,—or ever since she was born, which was four years later. But I swear I'd give a year of Josephine's cold, classic, beautiful regularity for a minute of—pshaw, don't be a fool! I'll go and look at the yacht. I wonder whether anything's left of her? Nobody would think there had been a storm of any kind to look at the lake to-day. What a lovely morning!"
Indeed, the wind had gone down to a gentle breeze, and the surface of the lake was tossing in thousands of merry little waves, their white crests sparkling in the sunlight.
"The old ship is still standing," he continued, soliloquizing again, as he walked toward the bluff. "I suppose it will come awfully hard on the old man when he finds out that the government is going to sell her. What did they tell me his name was? Somebody or other distinguished; I forget who. Must have been a fine old chap in his day. What was it he said when he looked out of the window before he bade me good-night? This is going to be rather a tough sort of a job, I'm afraid, and I don't half like it."
He had reached the hill by this time, and, feeling a little tired, he sat down on the steps overlooking the sea. There, below him on the Point, stood the ship-of-the-line. An imposing picture, indeed. He had been too busy the night before to notice it. He stared at it with growing interest, and a feeling of pity, for whom, for what, he could scarcely say, slowly rose in his heart.
"Poor old ship!" he murmured.
A ragged mass of fallen timber on the lee side proclaimed that some portion of her had been carried away during the storm of the night,—and she had little left to spare. There, too, on the reef beyond, were the remains of the Josephine, battered into a shapeless ruin.
"Well, that was a close shave; the Josephine will never carry sail again. What melancholy pictures!" he said, thoughtfully; "poor little boat, too! I've had many a good time on her, and now I—But I'd cheerfully give a dozen yachts," he continued, with the reckless hyperbole of youth, "to be rescued by——"
CHAPTER VIII