he hummed airily, gayly. "What was it you 'told them' back there, Vesty?"
Where now was Vesty's Sunday face? You would look far to find it.
"I told them you were a dude," said she.
"Did you, indeed! Girls who lead the singing in Sunday-school are not telling many very particular fibs this morning, are they? But you shall own up before night."
O Vesty!—the call of the "whistlers" down in the meadow by the sea-wall—"love! love! love!" No other note; it is that, too, breathing in the swift Bails and bounding the sea!
"You sail your boat as well as ever, Captain Notely."
"And why not—wife?"
These were the appellations of the old days, taken from their elders—"cap'n" and "wife."
Vesty did not think he would have dared that. Her dark eye chastised him. But he was not looking impudent; he was resolute and pale.
Vesty shivered. With all her earnest, sad experience of life, with her true love for Notely, she was yet in no haste to be bound. Wild, too, at heart; or else somehow the sea wind and the swift sails had freed her.