Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/226

218 "You profess to be ready to do all you can for Jamie and yet hesitate about relieving me of an irksome charge, and Jamie of what you consider barbarous treatment."

"You cannot be serious—I to marry Captain Cruel!"

"It is a serious offer."

"But papa!—what would he say?"

"I never was in a position to tell his thoughts and guess what his words would be."

"But, Auntie—he is such a bad man."

"You know a great deal more about him than I do, of course."

"But—he is a smuggler, I do know that."

"Well—and what of that. There is no crime in that."

"It is not an honest profession. They say, too, that he is a wrecker."

"They say!—who say? What do you know?"

"Nothing, but I am not likely to trust my future to a man of whom such tales are told. Auntie! Would you, supposing that you were——"

"I will have none of your suppositions, I never did wear a rush apron, nor act as Jack Pudding."

"I cannot—Captain Cruel of all men."

"Is he so hateful to you?"

"Hateful—no; but I cannot like him. He has been kind, but somehow I can't think of him as—as—as a man of our class and thoughts and ways, as one worthy of my own, own papa. No—it is impossible, I am still a child."

She took the end of the peacock's feather, the splendid eye lustrous with metallic beauty, and bowed the plume without breaking it, and, unconscious of what she was doing, stroked her lips with it. What a fragile fine quill that was on which hung so much beauty? and how worthless the feather would be when that quill was broken. And so with her—her fine, elastic, strong spirit, that when bowed sprang to its uprightness the moment the pressure was withdrawn; that on which all her charm, her beauty hung.

"Captain Coppinger has, surely, never asked you to put this alternative to me?"

"No—I do it myself. As you are a child, you are unfit to take charge of your brother. When you are engaged to be married you are a woman; I shift my load on you then."