“A great preacher was wasted in me,” she said.  “How I could have thundered at everybody else about their sins!  Cousin Mary, I’m coming down—­I’m all battered, knocking against the must, and the little trimmings hurt my hands.”

Cary did not smile.  His face was repressed and expressionless and in it was a look that I did not understand.  He turned soberly to his rudder and across the broken gold and silver of the water the boat drew in to shadowy Clovelly.

It was a shock, after we had landed and I had walked down the quay a few yards to inspect the old Red Lion Inn, the house of Salvation Yeo, to come back and find Sally dickering with Cary.  I had agreed that this sail should be her “party,” because it pleased the girl’s proud spirit to open her small purse sometimes for my amusement.  But I did not mean to let her pay for all our sailing, and I was horrified to find her trying to get Cary cheaper by the quantity.  When I arrived, Sally, a little flustered and very dignified and quite evidently at the end of a discussion as to terms, was concluding an engagement, and there was a gleam in the man’s wonderful eyes, which did much of his talking for him.

“You see the boat is very new and clean, Miss,” he was saying, “and I hope you were satisfied with me?”

I upset Sally’s business affairs at once, engaged Cary, and told him he must take out no one else without knowing our plans.  My handkerchief fell as I talked to him and he picked it up and presented it with as much ease and grace as if he had done such things all his life.  It was a remarkable sailor we had happened on.  A smile came like sunshine over his face—­the smile that made him look as Geoffrey Meade looked, half a century ago.

“I’ll promise not to take any one else, ma’am,” he said.  And then, with the pretty, engaging frankness that won my heart over again each time, “And I hope you’ll want to go often—­not so much for the money, but because it is a pleasure to me to take you—­both.”

There was mail for us waiting at the Inn.  “Listen, Sally,” I said, as I read mine in my room after dinner.  “This is from Anne Ford.  She wants to join us here the 6th of next month, to fill in a week between visits at country-houses.”

[Illustration:  “You see, the boat is very new and clean, Miss,” he was saying.]

Sally, sitting on the floor before the fire, her dark hair loose and her letters lying about her, looked up attentively, and discreetly answered nothing.  Anne Ford was my cousin, but not hers, and I knew without discussing it, that Sally cared for her no more than I. She was made of showy fibre, woven in a brilliant pattern, but the fibre was a little coarse, and the pattern had no shading.  She was rich and a beauty and so used to being the centre of things, and largely the circumference too, that I, who am a spoiled old woman, and like a little place and a little consideration, find it difficult to be comfortable as spoke upon her wheel.