The man who directed the launch was a stranger in a foreign-looking soft slouch hat—Charles plain to identify in every feature, in the big brown searching eyes that only Gaelic could do justice to, and his walk so steeve and steady, his lovely beard, his tread on the hard as if he owned the land, his voice on the deck as if he were the master of the sea. She stood apart and watched him, fascinated, and could not leave even when the work was done and the band was home-returning, charming the road round the bay with “Peggy Baxter’s Quickstep.” He saw her lingering, smiled on her, and beckoned on her to cross the gangway that led to the yacht from the little jetty.
“Well, wee lady,” said he, with one big hand on her head and another on the dog, “is this the first of my crew at a quay-head jump? Sign on at once and I’ll make a sailor of you.”
“Oh, please,” said she, looking up in his face, too anxious to enter into his humour, “are you our Kate’s Charles?”
“Kate!” said he, reflecting, with a hand in his beard, through which his white teeth shone. “There’s such a wheen of Kates here and there, and all of them fine, fine gyurls! Still-and-on, if yours is like most of her name that I’m acquaint with, I’m the very man for her; and my name, indeed, is what you might be calling Charles. In fact,”—in a burst of confidence, seating himself on a water-breaker,—“my Christian name is Charles—Charlie, for short among the gentry. You are not speaking, by any chance, of one called Kate MacNeill?” he added, showing some red in the tan of his countenance.
“Of course I am,” said Bud reproachfully. “Oh, men! men! As if there could be any other! I hope to goodness you love her same as you said you did, and haven’t been—been carrying-on with any other Kates for a diversion. I’m Lennox Dyce. Your Kate stays with me and Uncle Dan, and Auntie Bell, and Auntie Ailie, and this sweet little dog by the name of Footles. She’s so jolly! My! won’t she be tickled to know you’ve come? And—and how’s the world, Captain Charles?”
“The world?” he said, aback, looking at her curiously as she seated herself beside him on a hatch.
“Yes, the world, you know—the places you were in,” with a wave of the hand that seemed to mean the universe.
“‘Edinburgh, Leith,
Portobello, Musselburgh, and Dalkeith?’
—No, that’s Kate’s favourite geography lesson, ’cause she can sing it. I mean Rotterdam, and Santander, and Bilbao—all the lovely places on the map where a letter takes four days and a twopence-ha’penny stamp, and’s mighty apt to smell of rope.”
“Oh, them!” said he, with the warmth of recollection, “they’re not so bad—in fact, they’re just A1. It’s the like of there you see life and spend the money.”