“Oh, do they!” Vieve answered. “To think that anybody shouldn’t know that! Why, dozens of them.”
“Well,” he went on, “I heard a great piece of news last night, and feel like celebrating a little to-day. We’ll get the stewardess directly and go out and see whether you can find anything to fit you. You can buy the whole business, can you? Hat, coat, dress, shoes, and all?”
“Yes, when you have money enough,” Vieve laughed. “But what is it, Kit? What is this great piece of news? Ah, now, Kit, you ought to tell me; I always tell you everything.”
“Not till we get home, Miss Curiosity,” he answered. “When we get home I’ll tell you all about it.”
Kit wisely declined to go further than the door of any of the big bazaars that the stewardess led them to. But Vieve’s first experiment in “shopping” must have been successful, for when Kit took her over the Brooklyn Bridge toward evening to see Captain Griffith and the North Cape, her appearance was so changed that her mother would hardly have known her.
And to tell the good news about his father to Captain Griffith was almost equal to telling it at home, the Captain took such an interest. He had to go over the whole story of his voyage to Melbourne and then across to Wellington, and describe his first meeting with his father, and everything that happened afterwards.
“Well, Miss Silburn,” the Captain said, when Kit concluded—“or I think I’ll have to call you Miss Vieve,—I’m almost one of the family, you know, and one of the first things I did when I got hold of Christopher was to read a letter you wrote him—”
“Oh, yes, sir, I hope you’ll call me Vieve,” Vieve interrupted; “I shouldn’t know who you meant if you called me Miss Silburn.”
“Well, I was going to say,” the Captain went on, “that I took an interest in you all from the time Christopher read me those letters from home on the first evening I knew him. And when I heard about the dollar’s worth of stamps you sent him, and the way he was robbed of them, I came very near handing him a greenback to send in his letter to you. But I was afraid it might spoil him. Boys are very easily spoiled; specially cabin boys. I don’t suppose he’s ever told you about how I had to train him in, in the first voyage or two.”
“Don’t you believe it, Vieve!” Kit laughed; “the Captain wouldn’t hurt a cat.”