"So shall I. It'll be a weight off my mind, don't you know?" said Tinker with a sigh.
"I'm sure it will," said the sympathetic Elsie.
"It must be awfully nice to be in love," she added with conviction.
"Now, look here," said Tinker in a terrible voice, "if I catch you falling in love, I'll—I'll shake you!"
"But—but, I may be in love—ever so much, for anything you know," said Elsie somewhat haughtily.
"You are not," said Tinker sternly. "Your appetite is all right. Don't talk any more nonsense, but come along, we've got to get ready for the picnic."
At half-past eleven the two children went on board the Petrel, a little steam yacht of a shallow draught adapted to the shoals of the Gulf, which Septimus Rainer had hired from a member of the Bordeaux Yacht Club. They found Dorothy and Sir Tancred already on board, and were told that a cablegram from New York had given her father, his secretaries, and the telegraph office of Arcachon a day's work, and prevented him from coming with them. Tinker had known this fact all the morning, but he did not say so. His manner to his father showed a serene unconsciousness of any cloud upon their relations.
The Petrel was soon crossing the Gulf in an immensely important way, at her full speed of eight knots an hour. In pursuance of his policy Tinker took Elsie forward, and left Dorothy and his father to entertain one another on the quarter-deck. The two children amused themselves very well talking to Alphonse, the steersman, and Adolphe, the engineer, thick-set, thick-witted men, who combined the picturesqueness of organ-grinders with the stolidity of agriculturalists; Nature had plainly intended them for the plough, and Circumstance had pitched them into seafaring.
An hour's steering brought them across the Gulf. They landed, and made their déjeuner at a little auberge, or rather cabaret, affected by fishermen, and the folk of the Landes, off grey mullet, fresh from the Bay of Biscay, grilled over a fire of pine-cones, with a second course of ring-doves roasted before it.
After their coffee Tinker suggested that they should cross over to the strip of sand which at that point separates the Gulf from the Bay, and the others fell in with his humour. They crossed over and landed in the yacht's dinghy. Tinker insisted on taking two rugs, though both Dorothy and his father objected that the sand was quite dry enough to sit on. However, when they came to the beach of the Bay, Sir Tancred spread them out, and he and Dorothy sat on them. The two children wandered away, and presently Elsie found herself holding Tinker's hand, and running hard through the pines towards the landing-place.