Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/254

236 the ship; swells from a faraway freighter swept under the beautiful, burnished craft, causing it to roll lazily as they boarded it. A party of nearly a dozen men and girls, with an older woman chaperoning them, lounged under the shade of an awning over the after deck. They greeted her gaily and looked curiously at Alan as she introduced him.

As he returned their rather formal acknowledgments and afterward fell into general conversation with them, she became for the first time fully aware of how greatly he had changed from what he had been when he had come to them six months before in Chicago. These gay, wealthy loungers would have dismayed him then, and he would have been equally dismayed by the luxury of the carefully appointed yacht; now he was not thinking at all about what these people might think of him. In return, they granted him consideration. It was not, she saw that they accepted him as one of their own sort, or as some ordinary acquaintance of hers; if they accounted for him to themselves at all, they must believe him to be some officer employed upon her father's ships. He looked like that—with his face darkened and reddened by the summer sun and in his clothing like that of a ship's officer ashore. He had not weakened under the disgrace which Benjamin Corvet had left to him, whatever that might be; he had grown stronger facing it. A lump rose in her throat as she realized that the lakes had been setting their seal upon him, as upon the man whose strength and resourcefulness she loved.

"Have you worked on any of our boats?" she asked him, after luncheon had been finished, and the anchor of the ship had been raised.