“Shall I belay away the jib or reef the upper hatchways?” Ingram called out to Sheila when they had fairly got under way.

She did not answer for a moment:  she was still watching with a critical eye the manner in which the boat answered to her wishes; and then, when everything promised well and she was quite satisfied, she said, “If you will take my place for a moment and keep a good lookout, I will put on my gloves.”

She surrendered the tiller and the mainsail sheets into his care, and, with another glance ahead, pulled out her gloves.

“You did not use to fear the salt water or the sun on your hands, Sheila,” said her companion.

“I do not now,” she said, “but Frank would be displeased to see my hands brown.  He has himself such pretty hands.”

What Ingram thought about Frank Lavender’s delicate hands he was not going to say to his wife; and indeed he was called upon at this moment to let Sheila resume her post, which she did with an air of great satisfaction and content.

And so they ran lightly through the curling and dashing water on this brilliant day, caring little indeed for the great town that lay away to leeward, with its shining terraces surmounted by a faint cloud of smoke.  Here all the roar of carriages and people was unheard:  the only sound that accompanied their talk was the splashing of the waves at the prow and the hissing and gurgling of the water along the boat.  The south wind blew fresh and sweet around them, filling the broad white sails and fluttering the small pennon up there in the blue.  It seemed strange to Sheila that she should be so much alone with so great a town close by—­that under the boom she could catch a glimpse of the noisy Parade without hearing any of its noise.  And there, away to windward, there was no more trace of city life—­only the great blue sea, with its waves flowing on toward them from out of the far horizon, and with here and there a pale ship just appearing on the line where the sky and ocean met.

“Well, Sheila, how do you like being on the sea again?” said Ingram, getting out his pipe.

“Oh, very well.  But you must not smoke, Mr. Ingram:  you must attend to the boat.”

“Don’t you feel at home in her yet?” he asked.

“I am not afraid of her,” said Sheila, regarding the lines of the small craft with the eye of a shipbuilder, “but she is very narrow in the beam, and she carries too much sail for so small a thing I suppose they have not any squalls on this coast, where you have no hills and no narrows to go through.”

“It doesn’t remind you of Lewis, does it?” he said, filling his pipe all the same.

“A little—­out there it does,” she said, turning to the broad plain of the sea, “but it is not much that is in this country that is like the Lewis:  sometimes I think I shall be a stranger when I go back to the Lewis, and the people will scarcely know me, and everything will be changed.”