Jane turned her head with a peculiar feeling that nothing was unusual with this strange setting. It was Breck.
“Yes, and I would like to see a real artist do a huge canvas of it, wouldn’t you?” she said.
“If he could get that unreal light that just burst forth,” Breck said.
There was the clang-clang of a passing trolley car and the spell was broken. Jane’s thoughts came crashing back to reality. What in the world did Breck know about Dunsany and art? And if he did know about them, as it was evident that he did, what could be his object in being a paid sailor on a rich man’s yacht?
However, it was Breck’s business and, if he did not wish to throw any light on the subject, she would not pry into his affairs but she felt that he was conscious of the slip he made. Breck’s confusion was evident, so the girl casually asked what time it was and told him that she had to meet her friends for dinner and so was going. She smiled good-bye and walked off down the hill.
Jane left Breck rapt in admiration for a girl who was alive and interested in everything and thoroughly feminine, but had tact enough to keep from trying to divine some one else’s secret.
He thought that he couldn’t imagine his sister or any of her friends refraining in so quietly sympathetic a manner from rushing in where angels feared to tread. All of these girls had a breezy out-doorsy way with them that he liked and he wished that that same sister of his might have joined a Camp Fire organization before she made her very successful debut. All of which thoughts were strange thoughts for an ordinary deck-hand to be entertaining in a mystic cemetery when he ought—if he was to stay in character—to be guzzling a plate of beans at a “Quick and Dirty.”
The others were waiting for Jane at the Samoset when she got there, rather out of breath from her fast walk.
“Jane looks so mysterious, I am sure she must have had a million adventures,” teased Frances.
“You might tell us about them if you did,” Ellen said. “We made a very ordinary trip from the boat to shore, landing as usual.”