“Would you mind telling me their names, Cary?” she asked.  He had told us to call him Cary.  “The names of the Mr. Leighs of Burrough.”

“No, Cary,” I said.  “I think Miss Meade doesn’t notice that she is asking you personal questions about your friends.”

Cary turned on me a look full of gentleness and chivalry.  “Miss Meade doesn’t ask anything that I cannot answer perfectly well,” he said.  “There are two sons of the Leighs, Richard Grenville, the older, and Amyas Francis, the younger.  They keep the old names you see.  Richard—­Sir Richard, I should say—­is the head of the family, his father being dead.”

“Sir Richard Grenville Leigh!” said Sally, quite carried away by that historic combination.  “That’s better than Amyas,” she went on, reflectively.  “Is he decent?  But never mind.  I’ll marry him, Cousin Mary.”

At that our sailor-man shook with laughter, and as I met his eyes appealing for permission, I laughed as hard as he.  Only Sally was apparently quite serious.

“He would he very lucky—­Miss,” he said, restraining his mirth with a respect that I thought remarkable, and turned again to his rudder.

Sally, for the first time having felt the fascination of breathing historic air, was no longer to be held.  The sweeping, free motion, the rush of water under the bow as we cut across the waves, the wide sky and the air that has made sailors and soldiers and heroes of Devonshire men for centuries on end, the exhilaration of it all had gone to the girl’s head.  She was as unconscious of Cary as if he had been part of his boat.  I had seen her act so when she was six, and wild with the joy of an autumn morning, intoxicated with oxygen.  We had been put for safety into the hollow part of the boat where the seats are—­I forget what they call it—­the scupper, I think.  But I am apt to be wrong on the nomenclature.  At all events, there we were, standing up half the time to look at the water, the shore, the distant sails, and because life was too intense to sit down.  But when Sally, for all her gentle ways, took the bit in her teeth, it was too restricted for her there.

“Is there any law against my going up and holding on to the mast?” she asked Cary.

“Not if you won’t fall overboard, Miss,” he answered.

The girl, with a strong, self-reliant jump, a jump that had an echo of tennis and golf and horseback, scrambled up and forward, Cary taking his alert eyes a moment from his sailing, to watch her to safety, I thought her pretty as a picture as she stood swaying with one arm around the mast, in her white shirt-waist and dark dress, her head bare, and brown, untidy hair blowing across the fresh color of her face, and into her clear hazel eyes.

“What is the name of this boat?” she demanded, and Cary’s deep, gentle voice lifted the two words of his answer across the twenty feet between them.

“The Revenge” he said.