Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/257

Rh torrent of words followed: an angry lecture on irreverence, a more angry history of "my Family, the Defews," and how they had left "your vulgar Yankee colonies, to be loyal to the Crown."—"Oh, why did they let me marry such people?"

"People?" smiled the captain. "That's bigamy, my dear."

"Oh," she moaned, "if I'd only known what I was about!"

"Well," he replied slowly, "I had no idee I was marryin' the whol' Royal Family."

As days passed, the argument over the schooner grew acute and dangerous. Perversity, it may have been; or a cruel whim of the spleen; or, perhaps, that veiled force which moves below so much of human action,—jealousy. The captain was seen no more about the wharves; now and then, in brief appearance on the streets, he trudged heavily, like a workingman at the end of day, and studied the pink sand before his path, with a gaze deep, introverted, unseeing. There at his feet lay in question the last surviving joy of his life.