"I never knew clouds look like them," says John, "when it did n't pour; and, if you take my adwice, you 'll stay just where you be."
"I 'll take your adwice," says the widow, touching his hand lightly with her soft fingers, and smiling upon him with that unpremeditated coquetry that always makes a woman charming. It was especially charming to this man, for no woman had ever smiled upon him like that; and then to think she had asked and accepted his advice, withal! It was enough to turn his head, and it did.
"I'll take your adwice, Captain," she says, "and keep the welwets dry, for it would cost a pretty penny to replace that wermilion, to be sure! I shall lose some time by it; and time is money. But what 's money but wanity and wexation, when nobody has a warm heart toward us?"
John Chidlaw sighed a long, long sigh, and then he turned his boat about and they sailed back again. By and by, as if to push him toward his fate, there flashed down a few big drops of rain. The sun was shining all the while, but he bestirred himself, and worked with a will, and the widow lent her little hindering help, and directly the canvas was spread and securely drawn down, and they were sitting beneath it, side by side, cosey as could be. She became more communicative now, and told him in what street she was born and who her father was.
"What! not —— Street, of our town here? And your father's name Peter Rollins, too?"
"Yes, Peter Rollins, coffin-maker, satin-lined and silver-screwed! The wery tiptop. None but quality come to him. When I was a little girl, I used to get into 'em, when we played hide and seek. Why, if you believe me, I 've been into many a hundred-dollar one, and had my head into the satin piller of it! That's the way I happened to cultiwate a taste for satins and welwets and the like, I guess."
She did not heed the intimation of her companion that he had known her father, but went on for half an hour without once stopping to take breath.
"Ah, Captain," she says, "I 've been dethroned in the world! I was born to riches and a proud position, but I married beneath me, a poor green-grocer that turned out a wagabond; and in my trials with him, I lost all my good looks; for I may say, without wanity, that I was good-looking in my girlish days, and lost all my wiwacity, and come to be the sober, staid old woman you see me."
"Old woman, to be sure!" says John. "Why, nobody would think o' callin' you old. You look a'most like a girl o' sixteen to me!"
"O Captain!" says the widow; and then she says his sight must be failing, though his eyes do look so uncommon bright; and then she says, with a little sigh, that she is upwards of forty.