“Ha! a very proper and pertinent question,” observed Slingsby, in an audible though under tone.
“I nevair do put pertinent questions, sir,” said Nita, turning her black eyes sharply, though with something of a twinkle in them, on the mad artist.
Poor Slingsby began to explain, but Nita cut him short by turning to Lewis and again demanding, “How you knows w’at I mean?”
“The uniform propriety of your thoughts, Mademoiselle,” replied Lewis, with a continental bow, and an air of pretended respect, “induces me to suppose that your words misinterpret them.”
Nita’s knowledge of English was such that this remark gave her only a hazy idea of the youth’s meaning; she accepted it, however, as an apologetic explanation, and ordered him to awaken the Captain and find out from him what it was that so riveted his attention.
“You hear my orders,” said Lewis, laying his hand with a slap on the Captain’s shoulder. “What are you staring at?”
“Move!” murmured the Captain, returning as it were to consciousness with a long deep sigh, “it don’t move an inch.”
“What does not move?” said Lawrence, who had been assisting to adjust the theodolite, and came forward at the moment.
“The ice, to be sure,” answered the Captain. “I say, Professor, do ’ee mean to tell me that the whole of that there Mairdy-glass is movin’?”
“I do,” answered the Professor, pausing for a minute in his arrangements, and looking over his spectacles at the Captain with an amused expression.