“I can’t believe my luck,” said Bob, gravely.
He said most things gravely, though there was not a man in Greyton who could laugh more heartily than he at a good joke.
“What luck do you mean, Bob?” asked Nellie Carr, lifting her eyes from the net she was mending, and fixing them on the coxswain’s bronzed face with an air of charming innocence. Then, becoming suddenly aware of what he meant without being told, she gave vent to a quick little laugh, dropped her eyes on the net, and again became intent on repairs.
“To think,” continued Bob, taking two or three draws at his short pipe—for our hero was not perfect, being, like so many of his class, afflicted with the delusion of tobacco!—“to think that there’ll be no Nellie Carr to-morrow afternoon, only a Mrs Massey! The tide o’ my life is risin’ fast, Nellie—almost at flood now. It seems too good to be true—”
“Right you are, boy,” interrupted a gruff but hearty voice, as a burly fisherman “rolled” round the stern of the boat in front of which the lovers were seated on the sand. “W’en my Moggie an’ me was a-coortin’ we thought, an’ said, it was too good to be true, an’ so it was; leastwise it was too true to be good, for Moggie took me for better an’ wuss, though it stood to reason I couldn’t be both, d’ee see? an’ I soon found her wuss than better, which—”
“Come, come, Joe Slag,” cried Bob, “let’s have none o’ your ill-omened growls to-night. What brings you here?”
“I’ve comed for the key o’ the lifeboat,” returned Slag, with a knowing glance at Nellie. “If the glass ain’t tellin’ lies we may have use for her before long.”
Massey pulled the key from his pocket, and gave it to Slag, who was his bowman, and who, with the exception of himself, was the best man of the lifeboat crew.
“I’ll have to follow him,” said Bob, rising soon after his mate had left, “so good-bye, Nellie, till to-morrow.”
He did not stoop to kiss her, for the wide sands lay before them with fisher-boys playing thereon—apparently in their fathers’ boots and sou’-westers—and knots of observant comrades scattered about.