"How do you know?" Lucy asked, looking at the incoming schooner from under her half-closed lids. The voice came like the thin piping of a flute preceding the orchestral crash, merely sounded so as to let everybody know it was present.
"One of my carriages was shipped by her. I paid Captain Farguson the freight just before I went away."
"What's her name?"—slight tremolo—only a note or two.
"The Polly Walters," droned Max, talking at random, mind neither on the sloop nor her captain.
"Named after his wife?" The flute-like notes came more crisply.
"Yes, so he told me." Max had now ceased to give any attention to his answers. He had about made up his mind that something serious was the matter and that he would ask her and find out.
"Ought to be called the Max Feilding, from the way she tacks about. She's changed her course three times since I've been watching her."
Max shot a glance athwart his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the pretty lips thinned and straightened and the half-closed eyes and wrinkled forehead. He was evidently the disturbing cause, but in what way he could not for the life of him see. That she was angry to the tips of her fingers was beyond question; the first time he had seen her thus in all their acquaintance.
"Yes-that would fit her exactly," he answered with a smile and with a certain soothing tone in his voice. "Every tack her captain makes brings him the nearer to the woman he loves."
"Rather poetic, Max, but slightly farcical. Every tack you make lands you in a different port—with a woman waiting in every one of them." The first notes of the overture had now been struck.