She looked up at him in evident surprise and with some disquiet.
"Why, what is it?" she asked. "I hope it isn't anything really terrible."
He hesitated, and began to scrape the ground with his foot nervously.
"I—er—Well, to be honest, I don't know exactly how to tell you so you won't be too hard on me," he answered frankly.
"Is it so bad?" she queried in a tone which showed some concern under its assumed lightness.
"What in the world have you been doing? You haven't been murdering anybody, I hope."
"What would you say," asked Jack, "what would you think of a man that acted like this? Suppose a case. Suppose the chap was, in the first place, in America. Suppose he had a friend, a friend he cared a lot about, one he thought more of than anybody else in the world, and that friend was on this side. Suppose the man's property was all tied up,—in trust, you know,—and he'd promised not to borrow, so he couldn't honorably raise the money to come over unless his trustee would let him. The trustee, we'll say, is a nice old fellow,—really nice, you know, only rather crotchety,—who wouldn't hear a word of the chap's going."
He stopped as if for encouragement, and Katrine, with evident appreciation of this, murmured, "Yes, I understand."
"And suppose," Castleport went on, a new hesitancy coming into his voice, "that this trustee—of course the chap is his nearest relative, you know—has an able schooner yacht. Now if the chap simply couldn't stand it, but captured that yacht—not violently, of course, but by stratagem,—and came over to see his friend, and to ask her"—