Over her shoulders the boy caught a glimpse of the black eyes. They signalled something. From old custom he could read that signal, and answered in code.
Half way up the cathedral aisle into which the nobly groined elms transformed the street, he met Captain Brent, on his way to supper—at Sally's.
"Why so down in the mouth, Mr. Boltwood?" This formality of the handle, off-ship, was suspicious.
"He's turned me down again," the boy muttered—in love and therefore out of sorts and "out of character."
"Point just a little closer to the wind, boy, Hiram's mostly blow." And his chief whistled a meditative stave or two, then as if he had found a solution in the melody, explained:
"It isn't that fool grudges against your dad—so much—he's afraid of losing her— And that," he added a bit wistfully, if a man, two-handed and upstanding still at sixty, ever suggests such a thing, "I can understand !"
But Ben, blinded by the selfishness of all young love, couldn't understand.
"He's always throwing it up to me," he grumbled on, "it's getting past a joke."
The Captain looked at him; whistled sharply.
"By the great Lord Harry, I thought you had sand!"
The first mate looked sheepish, and scanned the horizon…rattling good officer but boy after all. The older man smiled in amusement, then drove the barb in a bit deeper:
"And it takes that to win women as well as ships—including fathers-in-law," he added as necessary after-thought.
The boy straightened.
