David got impatient.  “Come, sir,” he cried, “don’t you hear the lady invite you? and every moment is precious.”  And he held out his hand to him.

Talboys decided on taking it, and he even unbent so far as to jump vigorously—­so vigorously that, David pulling him with force at the same moment, he came flying into the schooner like a cannon-ball, and, toppling over on his heels, went down on the seat with his head resting on the weather gunwale, and his legs at a right angle with his back.

“That is one way of boarding a craft,” muttered David, a little discontentedly; then to the old boatman:  “Here, fling us that tarpaulin.  I say, here is more wind coming; are you sure you can work that lugger, you two?”

“We will be ashore before you can, now there’s nobody to bother us,” was the prompt reply.

“Then cast loose; here we are, drifting out to sea.”

The old man cast the rope loose; David hauled it on board, and the schooner shot away from her companion and bore up north-north-west, leaving the luggar rocking from side to side on the rising waves.  But the next minute Lucy saw her sail rise, and she bore up and stood northeast.

“Good-by to you, little horror,” said Lucy.

“We shall fall in with her a good many times more before we make the land,” said David Dodd.

Lucy inquired what he meant; but he had fallen to hauling the sheet aft and making the sail stand flatter, and did not answer her.  Indeed, he seemed much more taken up with Jack than with her, and, above all, entirely absorbed in the business of sailing the boat.

She was a little mortified at this behavior, and held her tongue.  Talboys was sulky, and held his.  It was a curious situation.  In the hurry and bustle, none of the parties had realized it; but now, as the boat breasted the waves, and all was silent on board, they had time to review their position.

Talboys grew gloomier and gloomier at the poor figure he cut.  Lucy kept blushing at intervals as she reflected on the obligation she had laid herself under to a rejected lover.  The rejected lover alone seemed to mind his business and nothing else; and, as he was almost ludicrously unconscious that he was doing a chivalrous action, a misfortune to which those who do these things are singularly liable, he did not gild the transaction with a single graceful speech, and permitted himself to be more occupied with the sails than with rescued beauty.

Succeeding events, however, explained, and in some degree excused, this commonplace behavior.

The next time they tacked some spray came flying in, and wetted all hands.  Lucy laughed.  The lugger had also tacked, and the two boats were now standing toward each other; when they met the lugger had weathered on them some sixty or seventy yards.

A furious rain now came on almost horizontally, and the sailors arranged the tarpaulin so as to protect Mr. Talboys and Miss Fountain.