Like most sailors of his time Mr Lawrence possessed the instinct of superstition, a quality or element which has contributed the most brilliant of the rays to the glory of the[Pg 322] romance of the sea. He was sensible of an emotion of awe as he watched Lucy bowing to and addressing a royal apparition so well known to him as the Sailor Prince whose viewless eye might be upon him, whose invisible ear might be taking in his story whilst the wild-haired girl bowed apparently to the bulkhead or addressed the thin air.,
"You—" she commenced, her voice tense with passion, "you—" she checked herself. Unconsciously one of the groping hands had come in contact with the soft leather cover of a book which lay on the table.,
The decks had been washed down, the ropes coiled away, and everything was neat, sparkling with the swabbed brine from pump or bucket, and the whole a pleasant picture to the eye with its lofty fabric of wide white canvas, its glossy black sides descending into a ruddy coat of copper sheathing which charged the water immediately under with a yellow light as of fire, the canvas forward lifting and drooping in wings of triangular cloth like the pinions of a sea bird that gently flutters its plumes as it slowly breasts the water to the impulse of its webbed feet. Smoke from the chimney of the little galley rose for a space in a straight line, then curved like the liquid column of a fountain. The cook was preparing breakfast for the cabin, and the savoury smell of eggs and bacon in the process of cooking made the scarcely breeze-disturbed atmosphere in the neighbourhood of the schooner's kitchen shore-like and home-like, and in every sense delicious to hungry sailors whose breakfast was[Pg 341] black tea, ship's biscuit, and such remains of yesterday's beef as they might have preserved..
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