It was absolutely necessary for her to talk and it charmed him to listen to her sweet, half-foreign voice. At first she had seemed to him to be thoroughly French. Then he had found grafted on her extreme Frenchiness manners and ways so entirely English that she made at the same time an interesting and an amusing combination to him.
They were still well out at sea when she looked over her shoulder and made her first salutation.
“There is Thrum Cap,” she exclaimed, “wicked old Thrum Cap, thrusting his bald, sandy head out of the water, pretending to look at the moonbeams. What a tale the old villain could tell!” and she shook her glove so impatiently at him that her companion was moved to ask what power the barren sand dune had to call forth such a display of emotion.
“There are treacherous ledges beneath his shimmering waves,” said the girl. “Shall I tell you the tale of the English frigate ‘La Tribune,’ that was wrecked there in 1797?”
“If you will be so kind,” he said gravely, giving her no hint that he was already acquainted with the story of the disaster.
At the conclusion of her recital he gave her an inscrutable look, which she did not perceive.
“You seem—ah—to know a vast deal about your native land,” he said meditatively. “How has all this knowledge been acquired, since you left here at such an early age?”
“By reading, always reading,” said the girl restlessly.
“And you are fond of your country,” he said.
“Passionately. What else have I to love? Father, mother—both are gone.”