Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/311

Rh The girl perched on his elbow-chair, the white head and the brown tousled together.

"So I want ye to hev this. I'd saved it for her, waitin' for her to grow up,—like you."

The proffered book, a little black Bible, opened at the fly-leaf. Above a date forty years old, they read, in the captain's crabbed antique hand:—

"Oh, Father Captain," faltered the girl, between long silences. She stroked the hard old hands, corded with veins, tattooed with the blue quincunx. "I 'll feel better about your going away, now you 've left me this."

"No, girl," he said gravely. "Ye don't understand. This goes with ye, to steer by when you 're famous, and a great lady, and all."