“Talk not of danger. I’ll be happy every day to think I am braving the dangers my boy has braved before me. Professor Hodson,” she says, after a long pause, during which the savant has been musing on many matters, all of which revolve round Meta—“Professor Hodson, I feel younger, happier since you have come.”
“Your ladyship, then, must not be gainsaid. Well, I will accept the terms you so generously propose. We will at once fit up the Alba. All things promise well. We have in Captain Jahnsen a thorough gentleman, a sailor, and one who knows Greenland well. He has a daughter, too, who has been to sea. Might she not—”
“Oh yes, yes, if she would but come. She would be a companion to me and I to her.”
“Well, well, well. We will consider it all arranged.”
The professor rubs his hands, and laughs a joyous laugh; and the lady, rising, smilingly leads the way to the room where they lunch together.
The Alba is at sea. It is a lovely day in the first week of April. Well off the last of the Shetland Isles is she, and bearing west with a bit of northerly in it. Not steaming, though she has been fitted with engines, and can boast of a funnel elegant and pretty enough for any one to admire.
No, not steaming, for there is a ten-knot beam-wind blowing, and her sails are outfurled to it. White they are, and whiter still they look in the spring sunshine.
The decks are white also, and the very ropes, so neatly coiled thereon, are swirls of snowy-white. Everything about this natty yacht is neat and trim. The capstan is of polished mahogany, the binnacle is fit to be a drawing-room ornament. Whatever ought to be black about her is like polished ebony, and the brasswork shines like burnished gold.
On the deck sit two ladies. One, the elder, leans languidly back in her cane chair; the other—it is Meta—is sitting on a footstool at her knee, reading aloud.