Page:She's all the world to me. A novel (IA shesallworldtome00cain 0).pdf/44

 of your girls after him to Balladhoo to ask him to meet me in half an hour at the harbor-master's cottage on the quay—"

"Here! Let it be here;" calling "Jane!"

"No, let it be on the quay," said Christian; "I have to go there presently, and it will save time, you know."

"Bless me, man! have you come to your saving days at last?"

Kinvig turned aside, instructed Jane, and resumed the thread of his technical explanations.

"Let me show you this knot again; that bum-bailiff creature was bothering you before. Look now—stand here—so."

"Yes," said Christian, with the resignation of a martyr.

Then Kinvig explained everything afresh, but with an enthusiasm that was sadly damped by Christian's manifest inability to command the complexities of the invention.

"I thought once that you were going to be a bit of an engineer yourself, Christian. Bless me, the amazing learned you were at the wheels, and the cranks, and the axles when you were a lad in jackets; but"—with a suspicious smile—"it's likely you're doing something in the theology line now, and that's a sort of feeding and sucking and suction that won't go with the engineering anyhow." Christian smiled faintly, and Kinvig, as if by an after-thought shouted:

"Heigh-ho! Let's take the road for it. We've kept this young woman too long from her work already." (Going out.) "You didn't give her much of a spell at