"Well, good-night."
"Good-night, boy."
Silence again reigned, but Jack, once more aroused, threshed about uneasily until far into the night. Resolutely as he might determine not to think of the possible consequences of the carrying off of that big blue letter, he could not prevent doubt from recurring constantly to his mind, and something not so far removed from remorse mingled with his thoughts of Katrine and of the delight of traveling in her company. He was so long awake that on the next afternoon Mrs. Fairhew, when he had installed her and her niece comfortably in a first-class compartment on the 3.08 train, and they were beginning to see the olive groves and the villas slip picturesquely past the windows, noted the shadows beneath his eyes, and smiled to herself discreetly and unseen.
Chapter Nine THE DOLDRUMS
For two weeks the Merle had been lying at anchor at Naples. From Nice she had run first to Elba; thence she had doubled north again and rounded Corsica; she had touched at Calvi and Ajaccio; and lastly, running through the Straits of Bonifacio, she had held on east-southeasterly to her present anchorage off the Castle.
Despite the novel pleasures of command, Taberman felt Jack's absence so much as at times to be almost unhappy, even at times a little inclined to be resentful. He was still too boyish not to feel that to leave a yacht for a girl was the height of madness, if not of idiocy; and while he was too loyal to Jack to confess this feeling even to himself, it would at times rise in his mind, especially when he felt more than usually lonely. On his arrival at any port Jerry experienced to the full the excitement which even the oldest traveler feels in some degree at entering a new town. Whenever the port officer appeared in his official dignity, another sensation was added in the fear of detection and apprehension. A reaction would set in with the departure of the easily satisfied official, and Jerry would go mooning about with his hands in his pockets, whistling some spiritless tune until the time came to get up anchor and sail anew.
At Naples, however, things went somewhat better with Jerry than at any of his previous ports. In the first place even Jerry, unæsthetic as he was, could not escape the magic of the beautiful bay and the surroundings which opened up before him in the morning light as he approached the city. He said to himself, half as if in excuse for being so much pleased by mere scenery, that it looked as it should. It had, as it were, kept faith with him; and its beauty was to him an honest fulfillment of its fame. The gray cone of Vesuvius, palpably and gratifyingly like the pictures, stood at the head of the bay, crowned with an inky cloud of smoke. Away from it to the south stretched the cliffs of blue Sorrento and bluer Capri, melting magically into a background of hills or of the azure sky. On the north of the smoking cone a stretch of shadow-wrought shore, and then Naples itself, from the old Spanish fort on the water-front to the Castle of St. Elmo, long and gray, crowning the summit of the ridge behind, and the stone-pines silhouetted like palms against the sapphire sky. Naples, with its great four-square houses of pink, and white, and yellow, heaped, as it were, one above another; its red-tiled roofs, its terraces tricked out with vines or fig-trees; Naples, with its church roofs of variegated tiles, its long quays yellowish gray about the shore—Jerry could well have believed himself in some enchanted picture city, a city which might almost be expected to vanish suddenly if one should close the book it graced.