“Better than guineas!” answered back Mrs. Sandy Bruce, quick as a flash; and in the same second cries Archie, from the front seat, with a saucy laugh, “And as long as she lives, Mr. Dalgetty!”

The Captain of the “Heather Bell”.

You might have known he was a Scotchman by the name of his little steamer; and if you had not known it by that, you would have known it as soon as you looked at him.  Scotch, pure, unmitigated, unmistakable Scotch, was Donald Mackintosh, from the crown of his auburn head down to the soles of his big awkward feet.  Six feet two inches in his stockings he stood, and so straight that he looked taller even than that; blue-gray eyes full of a canny twinkle; freckles,—­yes, freckles that were really past the bounds of belief, for up into his hair they ran, and to the rims of his eyes,—­no pale, dull, equivocal freckles, such as might be mistaken for dingy spots of anything else, but brilliant, golden-brown freckles, almost auburn like his hair.  Once seen, never to be forgotten were Donald Mackintosh’s freckles.  All this does not sound like the description of a handsome man; but we are not through yet with what is to be said about Donald Mackintosh’s looks.  We have said nothing of his straight massive nose, his tawny curling beard, which shaded up to yellow around a broad and laughing mouth, where were perpetually flashing teeth of an even ivory whiteness a woman might have coveted.  No, not handsome, but better than handsome, was Donald Mackintosh; he was superb.  Everybody said so:  nobody could have been found to dispute it,—­nobody but Donald himself; he thought, honestly thought, he was hideous.  All that he could see on the rare occasions when he looked in a glass was an expanse of fiery red freckles, topped off with what he would have called a shock of red hair.  Uglier than anything he had ever seen in his life, he said to himself many a time, and grew shyer and shyer and more afraid of women each time he said it; and all this while there was not a girl in Charlottetown that did not know him in her thoughts, if indeed she did not openly speak of him, as that “splendid Donald Mackintosh,” or “the handsome ‘Heather Bell’ captain.”

But nothing could have made Donald believe this, which was in one way a pity, though in another way not.  If he had known how women admired him, he would have inevitably been more or less spoiled by it, wasted his time, and not have been so good a sailor.  On the other hand, it was a pity to see him,—­forty years old, and alone in the world,—­not a chick nor a child of his own, nor any home except such miserable makeshifts as a sailor finds in inns or boarding-houses.