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Rh have been expected. As he turned back and read the noble lines from the first, his eyes glistened, and above the white beard his cheeks slowly flushed.

"One o' the best things I ever read!" he declared recklessly. "Don't care if 't is a poem!"

At the close he sighed.

"Why, anybody might think jest like that,—a little fancy, p'raps, but—jest like that."

His brown fingers, bent over many a rope, cramped at many a helm, closed the book gently.

"Read as much o' him as you like, my girl."

Joyce laughed, but her brown eyes, watching the heavy-hewn old face above her, shone as with young love and worship of a sage. These chats with the captain were somehow like glimpses of communion with the father and mother whom she had been too little to know: in her vision he remained, through the faith-shaken trials of her youth, "like a great sea-mark standing every flaw."