"She walks right along!" cried Romer. He was exhilarated by the speed of his boat, which was, in fact, a racer, and built in all her lines to get over a triangular course in the least possible time. He talked about her safe points to the landsman (who responded with the satisfaction of ignorance), but the final end of the Dream's being was speed, unqualified by inferior considerations. To this American idol, boats, like men, are sacrificed as matters of course. One scarcely makes conversation on so obvious a topic.
To tell the truth, Avery was not especially fond of yachting, and the careening of the Dream under the pleasant westerly did not arouse in him that enthusiasm which, somehow, he had expected to experience on this trip. When the water ran over the rail, he changed his seat to windward. When it rushed over, he held on to something. Tom Romer chaffed him amiably.
"Why, this is only a fair sailing day!" he cried. "Wait till it breezes up."
"Oh, I shall enjoy it if it comes," replied the lawyer. In fact, he was enjoying nothing. His thoughts surged like the water through which the yacht was driving. Their depth was enveloped and disguised in foam. When Romer said proudly, "She's making twelve knots!" his guest reflected, "I 'm so much farther away from her."
The same personal pronoun answered for the sportsman and the husband. Before the Dream was off Plymouth, the little cruise had assumed the proportions of an Atlantic voyage to the landsman's imagination.
By noon he remembered that in his hurry to get off he had made no definite provision with Jean about telegrams from, but only for messages to her. All that was arranged in the note, but he had torn up the note. With that leisurely appreciation of unpleasant facts which is so natural to the sanguine, and so incomprehensible by the anxious temperament, it occurred to him in the course of the afternoon that his wife had seemed much less well than usual when he bade her good-by; in fact, that he had never seen her look precisely as she did that morning. He began to acknowledge distinctly to himself that he wished he knew how she was.
He grew definitely uneasy as the early autumn twilight dulled the color of the water and the horizon of the distant shore. They were well on the Shoals now, for the breeze was stiff, and the yacht ran at a spanking pace. The wind was not going down with the sun, but rose strongly. The landsman began to be a little seasick, which somehow added to his moral discomfort.
"How can I get a telegram off?" he asked abruptly, much in the tone in which he would have called for a district messenger in the court-house.
"Oh, I might tap a cable for you, I suppose," returned his host, with twitching mustache. "Look here," added Romer. "What is it—mal de mer? or nostalgia? Do you want to be put ashore?"
"Not at all," replied Avery, with the pugnacity which men are accustomed to mistake for high ethical obligations to their own sex. "I only want to get a message to my wife. You see, I promised her."