One day, I remember I watched with Freya on the verandah the brig approaching the point from the northward.  I suppose Jasper made the girl out with his long glass.  What does he do?  Instead of standing on for another mile and a half along the shoals and then tacking for the anchorage in a proper and seamanlike manner, he spies a gap between two disgusting old jagged reefs, puts the helm down suddenly, and shoots the brig through, with all her sails shaking and rattling, so that we could hear the racket on the verandah.  I drew my breath through my teeth, I can tell you, and Freya swore.  Yes!  She clenched her capable fists and stamped with her pretty brown boot and said “Damn!” Then, looking at me with a little heightened colour—­not much—­she remarked, “I forgot you were there,” and laughed.  To be sure, to be sure.  When Jasper was in sight she was not likely to remember that anybody else in the world was there.  In my concern at this mad trick I couldn’t help appealing to her sympathetic common sense.

“Isn’t he a fool?” I said with feeling.

“Perfect idiot,” she agreed warmly, looking at me straight with her wide-open, earnest eyes and the dimple of a smile on her cheek.

“And that,” I pointed out to her, “just to save twenty minutes or so in meeting you.”

We heard the anchor go down, and then she became very resolute and threatening.

“Wait a bit.  I’ll teach him.”

She went into her own room and shut the door, leaving me alone on the verandah with my instructions.  Long before the brig’s sails were furled, Jasper came up three steps at a time, forgetting to say how d’ye do, and looking right and left eagerly.

“Where’s Freya?  Wasn’t she here just now?”

When I explained to him that he was to be deprived of Miss Freya’s presence for a whole hour, “just to teach him,” he said I had put her up to it, no doubt, and that he feared he would have yet to shoot me some day.  She and I were getting too thick together.  Then he flung himself into a chair, and tried to talk to me about his trip.  But the funny thing was that the fellow actually suffered.  I could see it.  His voice failed him, and he sat there dumb, looking at the door with the face of a man in pain.  Fact. . . .  And the next still funnier thing was that the girl calmly walked out of her room in less than ten minutes.  And then I left.  I mean to say that I went away to seek old Nelson (or Nielsen) on the back verandah, which was his own special nook in the distribution of that house, with the kind purpose of engaging him in conversation lest he should start roaming about and intrude unwittingly where he was not wanted just then.