"Oh, yes, you will, little girl. It's the privilege and prerogative of your sex."
He patted her on the head and went on, leaving her staring, open-eyed and tearful. She was the child of a neighbor; he had mended her dolls, soothed her griefs, and protected her since infancy, but she was only as a small sister to him.
While waiting for orders to Annapolis, he saw her many times, but she did not change to him. She changed, however; she had learned the name of his assailant, and through her expressed hatred for him, and through her sympathy for Billie as the disfigurements left his face, she passed the border between childhood and womanhood.
When orders came, he stopped at her home, kissed her good-by, and went to Annapolis, leaving her sad-eyed and with quivering lips.
And he did not come back.
CHAPTER I
She was the largest, fastest, and latest thing in seagoing destroyers, and though the specifications called for but thirty-six knots' speed, she had made thirty-eight on her trial trip, and later, under careful nursing by her engineers, she had increased this to forty knots an hour—five knots faster than any craft afloat—and, with a clean bottom, this speed could be depended upon at any time it was needed.
She derived this speed from six water-tube boilers, feeding at a pressure of three hundred pounds live steam to five turbine engines working three screws, one high-pressure turbine on the center shaft, and four low-pressure on the wing shafts. Besides these she possessed two "astern" turbines and two cruising turbines—all four on the wing shafts.
She made steam with oil fuel, there being no coal on board except for heating and cooking, and could carry a hundred and thirty tons of it, which gave her a cruising radius of about two thousand miles; also, with "peace tanks" filled, she could steam three thousand miles without replenishing. This would carry her across the Atlantic at thirteen knots' speed, but if she was in a hurry, using all turbines, she would exhaust her oil in two days.
When in a hurry, she was a spectacle to remember. Built on conventional lines, she showed at a mile's distance nothing but a high bow and four short funnels over a mighty bow wave that hid the rest of her long, dark-hued hull, and a black, horizontal cloud of smoke that stretched astern half a mile before the wind could catch and rend it.