“Of course you both want to see Henry,” the Captain laughed; and in answer to his bell Harry soon appeared, and Kit had to retell his latest adventures in brief. But it was growing late, and they could not prolong their stay, and they crossed the East River on a Fulton ferryboat to give Vieve a view of the big bridge by night.
Such a trip was like delving into an Arabian Nights palace for the young Huntington girl, and for weeks afterward she could talk of little but the wonderful things she had seen. And from what Kit heard while he was home, he imagined that the most wonderful things of all, the most beautiful, most lovely and enchanting, were not the busy streets or tall buildings, not the big ships, the great bridge, or the crowds, but the fascinating things she saw in the big bazaars, which she described with more technical terms than he thought she had ever heard of.
But Kit’s great news had to be told before they could let him go. He intended to tell it in the home circle, but he would have been more than human if he had not let Vieve tease him a little for it just after seeing how anxious she was.
“It is not to be mentioned outside of the family,” he said, “because I mustn’t be telling office secrets; but Mr. Clark told me I could tell it at home. You must know, then, that—ahem—ahem—”
“Oh, Kit, do go on!” Vieve burst out. “I’ll tell all about that Barbadoes girl if you don’t.”
“You can’t,” Kit retorted; “you don’t know anything about her. But to come back to business, the company is building a fine new steamer, larger and better than any of the others, to be called the Maida. She is under way now, and when she is finished, Captain Fraser is to command her, because he is the senior captain of the line; and Mr. Clark is to be her purser, because he is the senior purser. That, as you can see, will leave the Trinidad without a purser; or would, rather. But if the present arrangements are carried out, the new purser of the Trinidad will be—”
“Oh, Kit!” Mrs. Silburn cried.
“I see you’ve guessed it, mother,” he went on. “His name is Kit Silburn. But I only said if present arrangements are carried out, mind you. There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. The company may change its mind, or—or lots of other things may happen meanwhile. A purser gets exactly fifty per cent more pay than an assistant purser, and that part I should be very well satisfied with. But the Trinidad would seem strange without Captain Fraser or Mr. Clark.”
“Lots of other things,” as Kit predicted, did happen in the ten or eleven months that passed before the new Maida was ready for sea. The Silburn residence, for one thing, grew from a little story and a half cottage into a pretty two-story house, one of the best in Huntington. The new line of schooners between Bridgeport and New York, of which Mr. Silburn was manager and one of the stockholders, proved a profitable venture. Harry Leonard became a supercargo himself, and felt six inches taller from that minute. And it happened in the strangest way that the dinner-parties given at Sea View plantation, in Barbadoes, always fell upon the days when the Trinidad was in port.
Kit did not hesitate to speak at home about Miss Blanche Outerbridge, and for a time Vieve was inclined to be jealous of “that Barbadoes girl,” as she insisted upon calling her. But after a while Mr. Outerbridge brought his family to America for a visit, and upon becoming well acquainted with her, she had to say that Barbadoes produced some very pretty and companionable young ladies.