"It's a ship! Those are her skys'ls or royals we can see! She's bound this way!"
Emily's hands faltered. The wheel rolled through them. The Daphne clawed up in the wind until she was nearly aback forward.
"Hard up! Hard up!" cried Paul in alarm.
Blindly Emily recovered herself and put the helm up. The Daphne fell off before the wind and her skipper turned again to the strange sail.
"No," he said. "She's outward bound—going the other way. We could never overtake her." He took the wheel again. "Better look at her, partner. It's a full-rigged ship. Not many of 'em left. Pretty soon the sea will know them no more. They'll be gone—like—like the dreams of yesterday."
In a few minutes the outward-bounder dipped out of sight, but even before she went a mist had shut her from Emily's vision. "Dreams of yesterday," her thoughts kept repeating.
Although the Daphne had been lying along in a beaten track of vessels for more than two weeks, this was the first sail to be sighted from her decks—the first vessel to come within her ken since the four-master with the painted ports had "arrived out."
"Don't feel badly, Emily," Paul said as the gold woman faced him. "Any hour may bring us up with a homeward-bounder."
"I do not feel badly," she answered, and her pride helped her mask her feelings. "But if we are going to be home by next Sunday we are going to have one more 'picnic.'"
With that she went forward to the galley. The preceding Sunday she had prepared a luncheon for both of them and they had eaten it at the wheel together. They had prepared for it a day ahead, talking childish make-believes of what they would wear and of the good things they would have to eat. Paul had stolen the time to shave. Emily had found a bit of pink ribbon and put it in her hair. This had been their change of apparel. Such a meal as the cheap, sea-sour provisions of the Daphne afforded had been the "picnic" luncheon of their fiction.