"Then that's where we're going," he said promptly.
"I can't realize yet what has happened," she went on; "it was so calm and peaceful. It seems the strangest thing."
"Oh, this sort of thing's been done before," replied Medbury. "They can't accuse us of inventing any new kind of foolishness; so don't you go to feeling proud because you think you've found something strange. When you get out to Santa Cruz all the old captains in port will drop aboard and spin yarns about what's happened to them, till you'll think this is the commonest thing in the world."
"You're trying to make me feel safe," she declared; "that frightens me all the more. You take too much pains to assure me. Tell me truly: have you ever been in greater danger?"
"Yes," he answered; "many a time, and only last winter, for once. For five minutes, one night, I thought of more things in my life than I'd done for twenty years. I haven't done that yet, to-night. I never thought to walk the streets of Blackwater again."
Hetty tried to think how it would seem to feel that she, too, would not walk the streets of Blackwater again. In two months, she remembered, the cherry-trees would be in bloom there; she could see them whitening the whole village. She looked at him and smiled.
"Did you think of it in cherry-time, with all the streets and dooryards white with blossoms?" she asked idly, with a vague notion of distracting her thoughts from the present hour.
"Yes," he answered quietly; "and of other white things—of drawing my sled home from school through the drifts, and glad to be alive."
She caught her breath and turned her face away. She was beginning to understand, she told herself, what it was to be a sailor, and face danger year after year, living one's life mainly in dreams, with only far-off memories to feed upon. Her eyes filled with tears. Finally she turned to him again with a little smile.
"I'm beginning to know what it is to be a sailor," she said.