“I should think you must have dropped pretty distinctly when Mr. Lyndsay paid you; I suppose he did.”
“Sir, I was paid in gold of the Bank of Spain—in coin no longer current—by the woman herself.”
“Would you kindly interpret?”
“I will”; and he told the scene on the beach.
“Let me see that gold dollar.”
“See it! Not I. No profane eyes shall—”
“Stuff and nonsense! She will very likely want it back. Probably it was a luck-penny.”
“Very like. I shall keep it for luck. You are an iconoclast of dreams. Let’s go and kill fish. I have been trying to divide my enchanted mood with you. It has been a dismal failure. The fact is, I know as well as you—and a blank sight better—that this is a lady, that these are nice people, and that I am in a scrape. But to-day they may all go to the deuce and the bow-wows. ‘Let the great world spin forever, down the ringing grooves of change.’ He must have meant a railway. I never thought of that before. Don’t bother. I’ll go and call some day. Come, let’s kill salmon.” And they went to their canoes.
While this dreadful thing was agitating Mr. Ellett’s mind, it was also receiving due consideration at the breakfast-table of the Cliff Camp.
Rose Lyndsay, despite remonstrance, had been sent at once to bed on her return, and supplied with hot tea and more substantial diet, and ordered to go to sleep. Next to being wicked through and through, to be wet through and through was, to Mrs. Lyndsay’s mind, one of the most serious of human catastrophes. She was gently positive, and so Rose lay very wide-awake, and considered at ease the events of a most agreeable day, until, thinking with a little regret of her luck-penny, she fell asleep, only to wake up with the sunlight streaming in as her mother opened the curtains, and to hear the pervasive voices of the boys singing under her window: