“Come, let us go in,” she said, and led him through a doorway that connected with an adjoining room. In the center of it was a small table laid with linen and furnished with glittering silver and glass. “Are you hungry?” she asked.
“You know fishermen well enough not to ask that,” he laughed, and they sat down. Elsa did not make any tax upon his conversational powers. It was Code himself who first put a pertinent question.
“I take for granted your being here and your living like this,” he said; “but I am bursting with curiosity. How do you happen to be in this schooner?”
“It is my schooner; why shouldn’t I be in it?” she smiled.
“Yours?” He was mystified. “But why should you have a vessel like this? You never used one before that I know of.”
“True, Code; but I have always loved the sea, and––it amuses me. You remember that sometimes I have been away from Freekirk Head for a month at a time. I have been cruising in this schooner. Once I went nearly as far as Iceland; but that took longer. A woman in my position must do something. I can’t sit up in that great big house alone all the time.”
The intensity with which she said this put a decidedly new face on the matter. It was just like her to be lonely without Jim, he thought. Naturally a woman with all her money must do something.
“But, Elsa,” he protested, “your having the schooner for your own use is all right enough; but 214 why has it always turned up to help me when I needed help most? Really, if I had all the money in the world I could never repay the obligations that you have put me under this summer.”
“I don’t want you to repay me,” she said quietly. “Just the fact that I have helped you and that you appreciate it is enough to make me happy.”