“Now, Papa!” cried the girl, facing suddenly about. So suddenly, indeed, that she collided with an unseen somebody, slipped on the freshly washed boards, and fell at her victim’s feet. A bugle shot out from under his arm and banged against the deck-rail; but before he recovered that Melvin had stooped, said “Allow me!” and helped Molly up again. Then he lifted his cap, picked up his bugle, and proceeded on his way without so much as another word.
Molly stared after him, blushing and mortified, shaking her tiny fist toward his blue-uniformed back, and remarking:
“Huh! Master Melvin! I’d just declared I’d get acquainted with you but I didn’t mean to do it in quite that way!”
Maybe, too, her chagrin would have been deeper could she have seen the amused expression of the young bugler’s face; and again she observed—to Dorothy as she supposed:
“Anyhow, if you’d been a gentleman, a real gentleman-boy, you’d have stopped to ask if I was hurt. Huh! you’re terribly ‘sot up’ and top-lofty, just because you wear a uniform and toot-ti-ti-toot on little tin-horn kind of a thing that I could play myself, if I wanted to. Don’t you think so, Papa and Dolly? Wasn’t it horrid of him to trip me up that way and make me look so silly? Why don’t you answer, one of you?”
She turned the better to see “why,” and found herself gazing into the stern countenance of Captain Murray. That strict gentleman had recently been annoyed by the “skylarking” of girlish passengers who had tried “flirting” with his “boys” and was bent upon preventing any further annoyance of that sort.
“Your father has gone forward to meet your ailing friend and the little girl is with him. I would advise you to join them.”
That was all the reproof he administered, but it was sufficient to make Molly Breckenridge flush scarlet again, and this time with anger against the skipper. She hurried to “join” the others who had met Miss Greatorex and exclaimed with great heat:
“I just detest that horrid stiff Captain! He looked—he believed I tumbled against that precious bugler of his just on purpose! I wish I need never see either one of them again or hear that wretched thing toot!”
She could not then foresee how important a part in her own life that “toot” was yet to play; nor was the laughter with which her outburst was received very comforting.