“Oh, but a great deal may happen since morning, you know.”
“Yes, I realize that,” he admitted. And he vaguely hoped, and really believed, that his tone smacked somewhat of cynicism.
“You should stick right to the waterfront in these exciting seas,” she advised him, “if you don’t want to miss what’s going on. We dropped anchor just at noon today. We came up from the Celebes, where dad did some business. Right after tiffin I rowed ashore and started off to see the sights. I’ve seen them,” she ended humorously, and with just a tinge of restlessness. “Now I’m ready to move on to some other place. The older I get the more insatiable I seem to grow.”
“Then you didn’t linger about the waterfront long enough,” he thrust back, “to be quite posted yourself about what’s going on.” His sad eyes had a little sparkle in them.
But of course her most effective weapon was always the unassailable gaze—not, however, that she used it quite consciously. And as she gazed, Jerome felt a trifle uneasy. He couldn’t help himself.
“You had no chance,” he expanded, “to hear about the Skipping Goone.”
She repeated the name after him with the inflection of one who half remembers or is not quite sure. “Wait a minute. It’s not a name one forgets in a hurry. Oh, I know! She’s the schooner Aunt Flora was always talking about. Sometimes she called her that, and sometimes she mixed the goone up with other birds, but I never corrected her because Aunt Flora’s so delicious when she gets things just a little wrong. I believe dad had something to do with that schooner in the first place, didn’t he? Some queer business of getting a skipper, or something of the sort?”
“Yes, that was it.”
“Aunt Flora told me some very amazing things about the man who’s taking an opera troupe around the world. There’s been a lot about it in the papers, and I remember dad’s shouting over it, too.”