He assented, and they went down to the water where the white and brown power yacht, with long, graceful lines, lay somnolently in the sunlight. A little boat took them out over the shimmering, smooth surface to the ship; swells from a faraway freighter swept under the beautiful, burnished craft, causing it to roll lazily as they boarded it. A party of nearly a dozen men and girls, with an older woman chaperoning them, lounged under the shade of an awning over the after deck. They greeted her gaily and looked curiously at Alan as she introduced him.
As he returned their rather formal acknowledgments and afterward fell into general conversation with them, she became for the first time fully aware of how greatly he had changed from what he had been when he had come to them six months before in Chicago. These gay, wealthy loungers would have dismayed him then, and he would have been equally dismayed by the luxury of the carefully appointed yacht; now he was not thinking at all about what these people might think of him. In return, they granted him consideration. It was not, she saw that they accepted him as one of their own sort, or as some ordinary acquaintance of hers; if they accounted for him to themselves at all, they must believe him to be some officer employed upon her father's ships. He looked like that—with his face darkened and reddened by the summer sun and in his clothing like that of a ship's officer ashore. He had not weakened under the disgrace which Benjamin Corvet had left to him, whatever that might be; he had grown stronger facing it. A lump rose in her throat as she realized that the lakes had been setting their seal upon him, as upon the man whose strength and resourcefulness she loved.
"Have you worked on any of our boats?" she asked him, after luncheon had been finished, and the anchor of the ship had been raised.
A queer expression came upon his face. "I've thought it best not to do that, Miss Sherrill," he replied.
She did not know why the next moment she should think of Henry.
"Henry was going to bring us over in his yacht—the Chippewa," she said. "But he was called away suddenly yesterday on business to St. Ignace and used his boat to go over there."
"He's at Harbor Point, then."
"He got there a couple of nights ago and will be back again to-night or to-morrow morning."
The yacht was pushing swiftly, smoothly, with hardly a hum from its motors, north along the shore. He watched intently the rolling, wooded hills and the ragged little bays and inlets. His work and his investigatings had not brought him into the neighborhood before, but she found that she did not have to name the places to him; he knew them from the charts.
"Grand Traverse Light," he said to her as a white tower showed upon their left. Then, leaving the shore, they pushed out across the wide mouth of the larger bay toward Little Traverse. He grew more silent as they approached it.