“Well, all that night it blew a soft, quiet wind, but for hours next day ’twas all dead calm, a light swell, the sunlight coming off the water hot as steam, and the yacht slewing round and round as if, like the rest of us, she was trying to find out where the wind meant to come from next.  I never saw any man fret more over a calm than Mr. Robinson did over that.  The lady didn’t appear discomposed; she sat under the awning reading, and once when Mr. Robinson turned to look at her she ran her shining black eyes with a smiling roll around the sea, that was just the same as if she had said, ‘Isn’t it big enough?’ for hang me if even I couldn’t read the language in them sparklers of hers when she chose to lift the eyelashes off their meaning, unaccustomed as Jacob Williams ever was to female ways and the customs they pursue!  But Mr. Robinson couldn’t keep quiet.  He kept on asking of me when I thought the wind was coming, and he was constantly getting up and staring round, and I’d notice he was always letting his cigar go out, which is a sure sign that either a man don’t care about smoking, or else he’s got something weighing upon his spirits.  P’raps, thought I, it’s stipulated that he’s not to get married anywhere but in the port we’re bound to, and that the license don’t run so long as to allow for calms; but this I said to myself, with a wink at my own thoughts, for, though there’s a good many things in this ’ere yearth that I don’t understand, I must tell you Jacob Williams wasn’t born without a mind.

“Well, time went on, and then a head-wind sprung up, with a short, spiteful sea.  I kept the yacht under a press, according to orders, and the driving of her close-hauled, every luff trembling and the foam to leeward as high as the rail, fairly smothered the vessel forward; whilst as to her movements, it was dreary and aching enough, I can tell you, the wind sweeping out of clouds of spray forward and splitting with shrieks upon the ropes, and the canvas soaking up the damp till every stretch might have been owned for the matter of color by a coalman.  ’Twas ’bout ship often enough, Mr. Robinson being full of anxiety and impatience, and watching the compass for a shift of wind as if he was a cat and there was a mouse in the binnacle.  I could have sworn the handsome party would have been beam-ended by the dance; it turned the stomachs of two of the crew, anyhow, and one of them said that if he had known the ‘Evangeline’ was to cross the bay, he’d have found another ship; yet the lady took no notice of the weather.  She’d come up dressed in waterproofs, and her beautiful face shining with the big eyes in it out of a hood; and the more the sea troubled the schooner, the more the vessel labored and showed herself uneasy, the more the lady would look pleased, laughing out at times, with plenty of music in her voice, I allow, but with a something in it and in the gleaming stare she’d keep on the plunging and streaming bows, that made me calculate—­don’t know why, I’m sure—­that lovely as she was and beautiful as she was shaped, there was no more heart inside of her than there’s pearls in cockles.