Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/68

 response, and his eyes held hers until, with an effort, she withdrew her gaze.

Then he rose, and his men placed deep chairs for us in a sheltered corner, where we could look out across the blue to the low hills of the moor. There was a fur rug over my chair, and I sank gratefully into the warmth of it.

"With a wind like this in the old days," Olaf said, as he stood beside me looking out over the sparkling water, "how the sails would have been spread, and now there is nothing but steam and gasoline and electricity."

"Why don't you have sails then," Nancy challenged him, "instead of steam?"

"I have a ship. Shall I show you the picture of it?"

He left to get it, and Nancy said to me, "Ducky, will you pinch me?"

"You mean that it doesn't seem real?"

She nodded.

"Well, maybe it isn't. He said he was a sort of Flying Dutchman."

"I should hate to think that he wasn't real, Elizabeth. He is as alive as—a burning coal."

Olaf came back with the pictures of his ship, a clean-cut, beautiful craft, very up-to-date, except for the dragon-heads at prow and stem.

"If I could have had my way," he told us, "I 62