“Do you call it behaving well to tip over?”

“She behaved well before that.  She didn’t tip over outside the reef”

“It certainly goes very smoothly,” said the girl.  She had in vain recurred to the tragic motive of her coming; she could not revive it; there had been nothing like expiation in this eventless voyage; it had been a pleasure and no penance.  She abandoned herself with a weak luxury to the respite from suffering and anxiety; she made herself the good comrade of the young man whom perhaps she even tempted to flatter her farther and farther out of the dreariness in which she had dwelt; and if any woful current of feeling swept beneath, she would not fathom it, but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface.  They laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay idleness of such rare moods.

They passed a yacht at anchor, and a young fellow in a white duck cap, leaning over the rail, saluted Libby with the significant gravity which one young man uses towards another whom he sees in a sail-boat with a pretty girl.

She laughed at this.  “Do you know your friend?” she asked.

“Yes.  This time I do?”

“He fancies you are taking some young lady a sail.  What would he say if you were to stop and introduce me to him as Dr. Breen?”

“Oh, he knows who you are.  It’s Johnson.”

“The one whose clothes you came over in, that morning?”

“Yes.  I suppose you laughed at me.”

“I liked your having the courage to do it.  But how does he know me?”

“I—­I described you.  He’s rather an old friend.”  This also amused her.  “I should like to hear how you described me.”

“I will tell you sometime.  It was an elaborate description.  I could n’t get through with it now before we landed.”

The old town had come out of the haze of the distance,—­a straggling village of weather-beaten wood and weather-beaten white paint, picturesque, but no longer a vision of gray stone and pale marble.  A coal-yard, and a brick locomotive house, and rambling railroad sheds stretched along the water-front.  They found their way easily enough through the sparse shipping to the steps at the end of the wooden pier, where Libby dropped the sail and made his boat fast.

A little pleasant giddiness, as if the lightness of her heart had mounted to her head, made her glad of his arm up these steps and up the wharf; and she kept it as they climbed the sloping elm-shaded village street to the main thoroughfare, with its brick sidewalks, its shops and awnings, and its cheerful stir and traffic.

The telegraph office fronted the head of the street which they had ascended.  “You can sit here in the apothecary’s till I come down,” he said.

“Do you think that will be professionally appropriate?  I am only a nurse now.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that.  But I saw a chair in there.  And we can make a pretense of wanting some soda.  It is the proper thing to treat young ladies to soda when one brings them in from the country.”