"'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
O away Rio!
Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
We are bound to the Rio Grande.
O away Rio,
O away Rio,
O fare you well, my bonny young girl,
We are bound to the Rio Grande.'"
When Emily got forward to the galley she found breakfast waiting.
"Why didn't you call me, Paul?" she asked in a tone of protest, and she waited archly in expectancy of a kiss, but he did not seem to notice this. "Partners must play fair."
"Never mind, Emily. I can do so little for you. From now on it will be watch and watch and there will not be much that I can do for you."
The bending of a new fore upper topsail and straightening out the tangle of running gear about decks occupied most of the forenoon. It was not until after luncheon that the Daphne, with Emily at the wheel, lifted away to the eastward before a fresh northwesterly breeze.
Paul ran aft as the bark entered upon her task and stood for a moment beside Emily. The intoxication which she had first experienced alone at the wheel was again upon her. The breeze was dusting loose wisps of her hair into a halo which the sun burnished with fire. Bosom heaving, eyes alight, her whole virgin being alive, a-thrill with love and the sensation of the Daphne's motion, she presented a figure which would have given fame to any brush that could have limned it. She might have been Daphne herself, not fleeing from, but hastening with her fresh treasures to meet Apollo.
Paul felt that he dare not speak. He put his hand on the wheel to haul the bark half a point closer to the wind. As he drew it away Emily touched it impulsively.
"Good strong, honest man's hand," she murmured.
Their eyes met in a flash in which her soul called to his and trembled when echo only seemed to answer it.
Paul turned abruptly away to stray the patent log over the taffrail. Then he went forward in silence. When he found himself a few minutes later staring out over the weather bow he wondered how he had gotten there. And the gold woman, watching him until he disappeared, kissed the wheel spoke his hand had touched and even again in the sweet agony of her love when she saw that it was flecked with the blood of his storm travail.