“A foreigner!” cried Sep, jumping, as was his wont, from one foot to the other with excitement. “It is like the boat that was brought up by the tide, with a dead man in it, long ago. And that was a Belgian boat.”
Miriam was looking at the boat with a sudden brightness in her eyes, a rush of colour to her cheeks, which were round and healthy and of that soft clear pink which marks a face swept constantly by mist and a salty air. In flat countries, where men may see each other, unimpeded by hedge or tree or hillock, across a space measured only by miles, the eye is soon trained—like the sailor’s eye—to see and recognise at a great distance.
There was no mistaking the attitude of the solitary steersman of this foreign boat stealing quietly up to Farlingford on the flood tide. It was Loo Barebone sitting on the gunwale as he always sat, with one knee raised on the thwart, to support his elbow, and his chin in the palm of his hand, so that he could glance up the head of the sail or ahead, without needing to change his position.
Sep turned and looked up at her.
“I thought you said he was never coming back,” he said, reproachfully.
“So I did. I thought he was never coming back.”
Sep looked at her again, and then at the boat. One never knows how much children, and dogs—who live daily with human beings—understand.
“Your face is very red,” he observed. “That comes from telling untruths.”
“It comes from the cold wind,” replied Miriam, with an odd, breathless laugh.
“If we do not go home, he will be there before us,” said Sep, gravely. “He will make one tack across to the other side, and then make the mouth of the creek.”