"Good day to you. 'Two bells,' says you, and two bells it is, all shipshape! It's fine and rosy ye look, ma'am!"
"Thank you, Mr. Ericksen." And under his light-blue predatory eyes the girl blushed as she shook hands. "I've been shopping this morning, and that always makes a woman happy, you know!"
They entered the breakfast-room, where the waiter, mindful of Ericksen's tip, led them to a table by one of the front windows overlooking the Art Institute and the sparkling blue lake front.
"Does it remind you of the sea?" Tom Dennis motioned toward the blue horizon, and smiled at the sailor.
"In a way, yes. It looks like the sea down south, under the Line."
"You've been in the South Seas?" asked the girl quickly. Ericksen met her gaze, and seemed a trifle embarrassed.
"Yes'm, oncet or twicet. I been whalin' with Cap'n Pontifex, you know, all us whalers work off Lower California and across to the islands 'fore going north—that is, we used to. Nowadays things change. 'There's no tellin' at all,' says the Skipper, 'what kind of a wind is rising these days.' And Skipper's right."
"You seem to like your skipper." Florence laughed. "Is he a nice man?"
Ericksen's down-drawn left lip twitched as if in repression of a grimace.
"Nice is as nice does, hey? I reckon he's all right, Miss Hathaway."