Kit. I thought ten months of it about preparation enough.
Arethusa. Ten months and a week; you haven’t counted the days as I have. Another day gone, and one day nearer to Kit: that has been my almanac. How brown you are! how handsome!
Kit. A pity you can’t see yourself! Well, no, I’ll never be handsome: brown I may be, never handsome. But I’m better than that, if the proverb’s true; for I’m ten hundred thousand fathoms deep in love. I bring you a faithful sailor. What! you don’t think much of that for a curiosity? Well, that’s so: you’re right; the rarity is in the girl that’s worth it ten times over. Faithful? I couldn’t help it if I tried! No, sweetheart, and I fear nothing: I don’t know what fear is, but just of losing you. (Starting.) Lord, that’s not the Admiral?
Arethusa. Aha, Mr. Dreadnought! you see you fear my father.
Kit. That I do. But, thank goodness, it’s nobody. Kiss me: no, I won’t kiss you: kiss me. I’ll give you a present for that. See!
Arethusa. A wedding-ring!
Kit. My mother’s. Will you take it?
Arethusa. Yes, will I—and give myself for it.
Kit. Ah, if we could only count upon your father! He’s a man every inch of him; but he can’t endure Kit French.
Arethusa. He hasn’t learned to know you, Kit, as I have, nor yet do you know him. He seems hard and violent; at heart he is only a man overwhelmed with sorrow. Why else, when he looks at me and does not know that I observe him, should his face change, and fill with such tenderness, that I could weep to see him? Why, when he walks in his sleep, as he does almost every night, his eyes open and beholding nothing, why should he cry so pitifully on my mother’s name? Ah, if you could hear him then, you would say yourself: Here is a man that has loved; here is a man that will be kind to lovers.