'Not if you sit still. That's it. Now, you can raise your head and shoulders just a little, so that I can see you talking. Speak!'
'If you don't speak you'll have to sing, and that will be worse for you, perhaps.'
'Well, child, I'm sure you love the sea.'
'Oh,' she cried enthusiastically, 'I love it! I love it always! I love all of it! It is always speaking to me and saying things in calm and in storm. And all the birds too; they are mine, you know. Watch that gull, Mr Blake, with his clean, clean white wings. He knows me, you know, because I feed him. He is coming nearer and nearer, tack and half-tack. You hear his wings now, don't you? Whiff—whiff—whiff they say. Now, look, but don't move.'
This little gipsy lass lay on her oars for a moment, put half a tiny milk-biscuit between her red lips, and held up her face. It was a sweetly pretty picture. Bare arms, feet, and neck; tiny red hands that held the oars; hair like dark seaweed afloat on her shapely shoulders.
Whiff—whiff—whiff went the clean white wings—it was underneath they were so radiantly white, and ever and anon turned the bird's graceful head to gaze red-eyed at Antony. Next moment the biscuit was whisked from the child's lips, and the bird was sailing for the rocks.
'You have been very good to sit so still, Mr Blake. The birds will know you now. I may take you out some time again. Sometimes I hoist a mainsail, but not a gaff. You know what the gaff is, don't you, Mr Blake?'
'Oh, yes, a hook-thing you land salmon with when you'——
Lotty was laughing merrily. 'I see you've never been much to sea,' she said. 'If I shipped the rudder and hoisted sail I suppose you couldn't manage the tiller and the sheet of the main as well. You know in a little bit of a skiff like this it wouldn't do to make fast the sheet, else if an extra puff came, then, before you could ease off over she would go.'