“Stop calling yourself names, my—”
“It’s mean to take it,” he interrupted, “but I have nothing else.”
“I don’t need it. I am as warm as a kitten in a feather pillow. It was a shame to wake you.”
“Wake! Do you think I’d sleep when—” He stopped, recalling how near he had come to the Land of Nod.
“But you must,—a little anyway. I’m not afraid any more.” She reached the handkerchief up to him, and he took it, holding and patting her hand a second before he went on. “Good girl! You make a jolly fine pal all right. I’ll bank on you.”
With those words still on his lips as he ran down the path to the wharf, suddenly before him rose the face of May Nell. Something tugged at him, gave him a queer feeling that he could not understand. He wished Erminie’s mother had been like Mrs. Smith, that Erminie might know all the beautiful things May Nell knew, might look out on life with May Nell’s clear, loving vision of the soul of things.
Even as he thought, and chided himself for it, while he fixed the tiny, fluttering signal, a rosy light in the east told him the night was going, and deliverance near.
Another dilemma presented itself—suppose a steamer should answer his signal, what would the crew, the scattering passengers, think if Erminie came aboard alone at that early hour? Could she do it and not cause comment? A story for the papers perhaps?
With this in mind he ran back, thinking to ask her; but no words greeted his noisy steps, and he knew she must be asleep at last. He threw himself on the ground before the ash-covered embers and in five minutes he also was lost to his troubles.
He had taken the precaution to face the east in such away that the sun, surmounting some tall firs, would waken him as nearly as he could guess at about six o’clock. As the first ray struck into his eye he started up to find it nearer seven, though but for his watch and the dancing, diamond-tipped ripples in the track of the morning sun, he would have declared he had not slept five minutes.