"By God!" cried Admiral Lawrence in a voice of thunder, letting fly the profanity with the bellows of a boatswain, "why, Acton, there's Lucy aboard that brig! I can make her out plain in this glass."
"She's a beautiful young lady—highly eddicated," said the master of Louisa Ann.
Captain Acton levelled his telescope. He did not need to long survey the figure of the woman who was standing near the tiller that was grasped by a man. The lenses brought her face close to him.
"It is Lucy!" he said, in a voice in which awe and amazement were so mingled that one should say the apparition of a ghost, of something spiritual and fearful to the observer, could not have filled the hollow of his mouth with that tone.
He was now seized with a passion of delight.
"Lower a boat, Captain Weaver! Lower a boat!" he shouted, losing his habitual gentlemanlike coolness and calm in the overwhelming sensations of that moment. "Bear a hand now! Be quick! It is the lady for whom we have been chasing the Minorca. Quick, I say!" He stamped his foot.
"She is waving her handkerchief!" cried the Admiral, with his eye at the telescope. "God bless her! God bless us all! What a miracle of discovery!"
"A relation, sir?" said the master of the Louisa Ann, addressing Captain Weaver, whom he had immediately perceived was not of the standing of the two Naval gentlemen.
"My daughter, sir!" cried Captain Acton.
"Then I'm proud and 'appy to have been the instrument of a-bringing her to you. I'm a father myself and can understand your feelings, sir," said the captain of the brig.