“Before you ask me to keep one for you. Now aren’t we modern, though? I reckon I’ve done the proposing, but I’m not the least embarrassed over it. Of course, if you had refused me, I might have felt a bit shy.”
Jane’s voice was muffled by reason of the fact that Breck was allowing very little room for speech and her sentences had more punctuations than a mere writer can put in print.
“Refuse you! Oh, Jane, what a darling you are! I can’t believe this thing has really happened to me, when I think how miserable I have been during the last months.”
“Well if you doubt it you can question the witnesses,” laughed Jane.
“Oh, that boy Fred!” exclaimed Breck. “I forgot him.”
But Frederick Gray had beaten a hasty retreat when he saw how matters were going between his new-found friends and had disappeared around a boulder, but his little tow-headed brothers were not so nice in their behavior. Silently they had entered on the love scene and had stood hand in hand viewing with wonder and astonishment the surprising carryings on of the Hurricane Island interlopers.
“Ith that girl your thweetheart?” lisped the younger one.
“Yeth, and the thweeteth thweetheart ever,” declared Breck. “Come back!” he called to Frederick, whose figure he could see in the distance. “The worst is over, old man. That is, over until next time. You are going to be a member of this firm, Fred, so you must come and let us talk it over with you.”
“All right, sir,” said Fred, whose ears were crimson from embarrassment. He looked at Breck with even more admiration than before. Any man who could win such a girl as Miss Jane Pellew was surely a hero in the eyes of the island boy. Fred was almost sorry he could not help being such a gentleman. When he saw how the wind lay, he felt it incumbent upon him to turn his back and walk off but he had a pardonable curiosity about how a man went to work to make love to a girl like Jane.
Hand in hand, Jane and Breck made their way to the beach. It seemed to the pair of lovers that the already perfect day was even more perfect than it had been before. The sky was bluer, the sea more sparkling. The “Boojum,” riding at anchor in the bay, looked like a fairy ship, while the gulls that circled around her seemed whiter and more graceful than ever gulls had been before.