The silent Breck had become quite talkative, responding to Jane’s naturalness as everyone else always did. He had told her about Gloucester and some of the amusing tales about the sportiness of the Gloucester fishermen even while they were hard at work off the Grand Banks. They had both read Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” and Jane was eager to know more of the delightful little town, and the sturdy independent people who lived in it.
“They know the sailing game better than anybody else in the world and you can tell a Gloucester crew and ship a long ways off just by the way she sails. And the risks they take! When most captains give order to put in a reef or two these Gloucester chaps just crack on more canvas and walk away. And they know all these waters like you would know your own top drawer,” he had told her.
And she had laughed at this last and answered that that showed how little he knew about her, because neither she nor anyone, not even a Gloucester fisherman, could sail through the conglomerate mess in her uncharted top drawer.
Then she had asked how he happened to know so much about Gloucester and had bitten her lip the minute she had said it, for that was the one thing she had meant not to do, question him about himself.
But Breck had answered her with a smile and a vague “Oh, I stayed here once.”
As she stood beside Frances, she mentally ran over the little talks she had had with Breck and realized more acutely how clever he was, how quick his perception, and keen his observation of people were. How she would have loved to have him take her through Gloucester and show her all the narrow little streets that ran back from the water, and which he had pictured so vividly to her. “Why are things as they are?” she asked herself. “I know Breck would like to ask me to go ashore with him tonight because he almost said so and yet he won’t because he is in Mr. Wing’s employ as a deck hand. As if that would make any difference, and anyway, I know he isn’t just an ordinary deck hand! He is twice as nice as anybody I have ever known and if he doesn’t ask me, I’ve a good mind to ask him to take me myself.”
“Jane! Jane! do stop dreaming, and let’s go below and get supper. That’s the second time Mabel has called us,” said Frances, giving her a little shake. “If I didn’t know you weren’t I would certainly say you were in love. Anyway you have all the symptoms.”
During supper, Jane determined that she would not let ridiculous little conventionalities prevent the promoting of her new found friendship with Breck. Clandestine meetings and common intrigue were entirely foreign to her straightforward self and so she decided that she would just tell the others that she was going to ask Breck to set her ashore and go with her to telegraph Aunt Min her next post office address.
“And Breck has been to Gloucester before and, while we are ashore, I am going to come right out and ask him if he won’t take me through some of those little narrow streets on the water front,” she confided to Mr. Wing up on deck directly after supper.