David Donner rubbed his eyes in amazement, hardly believing that his senses could actually be recording a picture of his granddaughter, hand in hand with some utter stranger of a boy, in his own precincts. He came quickly toward the pair, making a sound that came within an ell of being a shout.
Garde looked up in sudden affright. Adam regarded the visitor calmly and without emotion. Having first dropped the young sailor’s hand, Garde now resolutely screwed her little warm fingers back into the boy’s fist.
“Grandfather,” she said boldly, “I shall sail to-morrow for Hispaniola.”
David Donner, at this, was so suddenly filled with steam pressure, which he felt constrained to repress, that his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
“Go away, boy,” he said to Adam. “Mistress Merrill, your conduct is quite uncalled for.”
Having divined that his sister had deserted her post and gone, as was her wont, to the nearest neighbor’s, for a snack of gossip, he glared at Adam, swooped down upon Garde and caught her up in his arms abruptly, kitten and all.
Her hold on Adam’s hand being rudely wrenched asunder, Garde felt her heart break incontinently. She began to weep without restraint, in fact, furiously. She also kicked, and was also deporting herself when the door was slammed behind the forms of herself, her kitten and her grandfather, a moment later.
Adam looked once where she had gone. His face had assumed a stolidity which he was far from feeling. He walked to the gate and went away, without once turning to look back at the house.
Mistress Garde, confronted by David Donner at close quarters, soon regained her maidenly composure and wept surreptitiously on the stomach of the kitten. At length she looked up in defiance at the silent old man.
“I have changed the name of my kitten,” she said. “His name is Little-Standing-Panther!”