She stopped on the porch by the chair where her grandfather sat gazing at the ship and dreaming as usual. She bent low and kissed him as she had never kissed him before. He awoke from his reverie with a start, half comprehending, and gazed from the girl entering the door to Revere coming up the walk.
"You have been a long time, lad," he said, as the latter stopped before him.
"Yes, sir. We took luncheon together at the old inn and rowed back slowly. Your granddaughter—I shall have something to say to you in a day or two, sir."
"I hope so," said the admiral, quietly. "I thought so. But don't wait too many days. Days are as moments to the young; to the aged they are as years."
That day Barry had not left the ship. With a long, old-fashioned glass that was chief among his treasures, which had belonged to the admiral, he had followed the boat across the harbor. He had divined—by what cunning who can say?—what had been said in the pauses under the trees. He had waited and watched for them until the lovers came back. He knew it all. Twenty times during the period of their stay upon the shore he had gone down to the locker and taken out the letters.
And at last he had succumbed to the temptation. The devil had won him in the end. Hidden away in his corner of the old vessel, he opened the bundle of letters and orders. And as he painfully deciphered them, one by one, it all became clear to him. This cursed officer had come to sell the ship over their heads. He had stolen Emily's heart, and yet he was engaged to be married to another woman. The letters from Josephine Remington puzzled him; but as he slowly blundered through them, with their casual references to an engagement, with their quiet assumption that all was understood between the two, Barry became convinced that Revere was simply amusing himself with the admiral's granddaughter.
And was he to stand idle, indifferent, impotent, while these things were going on? Was the old ship to be sold and broken up? His ship! His love, too! Was that sweet flower of innocence to be rifled of the chief treasure of her womanhood and he do nothing? Was she to be robbed of her happiness, too, while he was there? No, never!
His brain reeled under the pressure of his thoughts. What should he do? What could he do? In what way might he compass the destruction of this man? Save the ship and save the girl, too!
Ah! Like to one of old in his blindness, there flashed an idea into his mind, as he stood there with the crumpled letters in his clinched hand. At first it startled him. It was so bold; in a way it was so terrible. But he had brooded too long to look at that idea in more than one light. With the one thought of revenge upon the man who he imagined intended to sell the ship, and who would gain Emily Sanford, he brooded upon the notion until it took entire possession of him, and then, although it involved his own destruction, he grimly prepared to put it in practice.