“What a welcome home for her!” he said softly. “My darling! Oh, if she could see her old home now! if she would only come, and I could be the first to welcome her and take her by the hand.”
“Yes,” he said, as he turned and gazed out to sea and shore, heedless of the fact that a group of sailors were slowly coming down the pier. “I will be there to meet her and take her by the hand. She could not have believed it; and, now that the time of sorrow is at an end, she will—she shall listen to me. Heaven give me strength to master this bitter, cruel pride and foolish jealousy. I will hope.”
“Bet yer a gallon it is,” cried a voice behind him.
“Yah! Yer don’t know what yer talking about. Such gashly stuff!”
“Oh, you’re precious clever, you are. Think that there schooner lay here all those many months and I shouldn’t know her again? Here, let’s go up to the point, and get the coastie to lend us his glass.”
“I don’t want no glass,” said another voice. “My eyes are good enough for that. Jemmy Gadly’s right enough. I could swear to her.”
The speaker made a binocular of his two hands, and gazed out to sea, at where the white sails of a yacht came well into view from beyond the island.
Chris heard every word, but he did not turn. He stood gazing at the yacht, which with every stitch of canvas set, was running fast for the harbour, beautiful in the evening light—a picture in that gleaming sea.
“Ay,” said the man at last, as he dropped his hands and turned to Chris, who was gazing out to sea with a strange singing in his ears, and a sensation at his temples as if the blood was throbbing hard. “Ay, that’s Mr Glyddyr’s yacht, sure enough, and he’s come back o’ course to meet young Miss. Oh, it be you?”
This last as Chris turned round upon him with a ghastly face glaring at him wildly.