‘Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast,
I saw his eyes fill with tears. He would take all the roughness, and danger, and hardship, I know. But men of the world are as dainty as women. If they give us the inside of the pavement, and let us enter a room first, they have gone the length of their chivalry. Then, there is the
effect on myself. In the society of such a man”—glancing to where Captain Cary stood—“I should be gentle and feminine. But with the wilted specimens of humanity I see ordinarily, I am in imminent danger of becoming a strong-minded woman. One must keep up a balance, mamma, and it is weak men make bold women.”
Mrs. Yorke sank on to a bench. “What do you mean to do? What am I to think?” she exclaimed.
Clara laughed. “Don’t be afraid, mamma. If this Neptune should offer himself to me—he will not!—I should refuse him, and then cry my eyes out afterward. But if he should take me by force, pirate-fashion, and run away with me, so that I could not help myself nor be responsible, I should be delighted. Now, don’t say any more about it, please.”
Mrs. Yorke threw off her fears with a shrug of the shoulders. It was a mere theory. It was one of Clara’s enthusiasms. “Well, my dear,” she concluded, rising, “all I have to add is that I hope your admiration of the rough diamond will not lead you to consume it in the blowpipe.”
And so the subject dropped.
“There is a party of Indians camping out on the Point,” Mr. Yorke said to them that evening. “You might find it interesting to visit them to-morrow. I met one in the woodland, this morning, cutting down a tree for basket-wood. I asked him who gave him permission to cut trees on my land. ‘It was all ours once,’ he growled out, and gave me a look that I shouldn’t like to meet, unless I had friends near. I told him to take all he wanted.”
The little sailing-party, only six with a sailor from the Halcyon as assistant, started early in the afternoon. The crew of the Halcyon gave
them a hearty cheer as they slid down past the wharf where she lay; the fresh breeze, blowing off shore, smoothed the waves, and, overhead, light clouds ran races with them. Out of one cloud, that seemed scarcely a hand’s breadth, a shower of large, sun-lighted drops came clattering down. In the midst of it they reached the Point, and stepped out on to the rocky shore. A clumsy old Indian woman had just kindled a fire, and piled brush over it. Not a spark was visible, but thick white smoke gushed out through the green, curled over into a shifting Corinthian capital, and rose into air, and in another instant it topped a shaft of flame. The woman took no notice of the visitors standing near her, but stood tossing twigs into the fire. Her face was ugly, her dress careless, but her small brown hands and moccasined feet were models of beauty. Two or three men were lying about lazily, waiting for their dinner, and a mischievous little girl was weaving a basket. She alone noticed the strangers, the others wore a look of disdainful unconsciousness. The ladies talked with the child, and bought baskets of her; the gentlemen made themselves acquainted with the elders, and found them not insensible to the charms of tobacco and coffee. Under these persuasive influences, their taciturn hosts melted, and became almost friendly. Presently, another Indian appeared from the woods, came straight toward them, and dropped a long string of quivering, rainbow-colored trout at the old woman’s feet. A whispered exclamation broke from the lips of the visitors as they saw this dusky young Adonis. The Greek outlines, with more than Grecian richness of color, the plumy, clustering hair, from which a few raindrops slid as from a bird’s wing, the eagle eyes, the fanciful dress,