“Isn’t it getting rough?” asked Ellen. “The ship seems to be tipping.”
“Yes, it is,” said Lottie, crossly. “Good-night.”
If the Rev. Mr. Breckon was making an early breakfast in the hope of sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he was destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by the paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother was reported by her father to be feeling the motion too much to venture out. The judge was, in fact, the only person at table when Breckon sat down; but when he had accounted for his wife’s absence, and confessed that he did not believe either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It had not gone so far as this in the judge’s experience of a neurotic invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain, and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and asked her where Lottie was.
“Oh, she doesn’t want any breakfast, she says. Is momma sick, too? Where’s Boyne?”
The judge reported as to her mother, and Mr. Breckon, after the exchange of a silent salutation with the girl, had a gleeful moment in describing Boyne’s revolt at the steward’s notion of gruel. “I’m glad to see you so well, Miss Kenton,” he concluded.
“I suppose I will be sick, too, if it gets rougher,” she said, and she turned from him to give a rather compendious order to the table steward.
“Well, you’ve got an appetite, Ellen,” her father ventured.
“I don’t believe I will eat anything,” she checked him, with a falling face.
Breckon came to the aid of the judge. “If you’re not sick now, I prophesy you won’t be, Miss Kenton. It can’t get much rougher, without doing something uncommon.”
“Is it a storm?” she asked, indifferently.