To Ellen, Jay said nothing at all but sat on the side opposite the sail and looked at her. Amazingly, his exhaustion was fled; he might never have seen a pump; he might have slept for eight hours, instead of snatches of minutes through the last three nights; he felt wonderfully excited.
"You had a time," said Ellen to him. "You surely had a time."
Still he said nothing to her and he never turned his head to the Arletta. She and he, and Ted, were sailing away from Mackinac and the fleet. "Where should I take you?" asked Ellen, as though he had come aboard for his convenience. "You want to go in?"
Jay shook his head. "Where would you go by yourselves?"
"We'd be going home now," she said.
"Mind taking me along?"
"Mind?" she repeated. "Mind?" Her gray eyes looked away from him to the water and returned to him to glance from his bare head to his canvas-shod feet. "You've been soaked through," she said.
Jay laughed. "Not through much." He was in shirt and canvas trousers. "We got dried this noon."
His sudden excitement was subsiding to a satisfaction made for him by the nearness of this girl in a white linen dress and with bare, smooth brown arms, with a slim, brown hand on the tiller and whose canvas-tipped toes did not quite touch the bottom of the boat, as she sat at the stern—as her leather-tipped toes always had failed, when she sat in his father's big chair, quite to touch the floor.
