Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/208

 telling me all the time? Something's happened to the boys!"

Mr. Bolliver stood hesitant, and Nicholas Tyler came up behind him.

"Won't she have to know?" he said quietly.

So Mr. Bolliver told her the bare facts, and Mr. Tyler wove in the few strange details of the disappearance that were known to him.

Jane stood quite still, and her mouth grew straighter and her eyes deeper as she heard. She knew, somehow, that she had to hear it, that she had come all the way to China to be told this, that this was what had haunted her in the Resthaven garden and made her pillow fearful by night. Strange things followed one another disjointedly across her mind: Mark saying, "Good-by, old Jane," in the sunset; Grandfather Mark writing steadily in his log-book, "My dear father was lost with his ship, the Fortune of the Indies, and all therein "; the little aunts in Resthaven, who already had lost three Mark Ingrams; the ship model between the sconces. She thought she almost hated the model now, that had held a decree of disaster in its old hull. Its fair sails towered over her and the keen prow bore