"How about Fitzgerald?"
"Oh, he's the most sensible of them all. He proposed to me the first night out."
"What?" The admiral dropped his pipe.
"Not so loud!" she warned. And then the clear music of her laughter penetrated beyond the cabin; and Fitzgerald, wandering about without purpose, heard it and paused.
"You minx!" growled the admiral; "to scare your old father like that!"
"Dearest, weren't you fishing to be scared?"
"Let's get out into the sunshine. I never could get the best of you.
But you really don't mean—"
"I really do not. He's too busy telling me the plot of this novel he is going to write to make love to a girl who doesn't want more than one man in the family, and that's her foolish old father."
And they went outside, arm in arm, laughing together like the good comrades they were. M. Ferraud joined them.
"I wish," said he, "that I was a poet."