"Well, she has the nicest kind of face," said Tinker; and his own was out of the common guileless.
"Oh! her face was her reference, was it?" said Sir Tancred quickly.
"You can forge references, but you can't forge a face," said Tinker with the air of a philosopher.
Sir Tancred laughed gently. "My good Tinker," he said, "I look forward to the day when you enter the diplomatic service. The diplomacy of your country will be newer than ever. But don't be too sure that a woman can't forge her face."
"There'd be a precious lot of forgery, if they could forge faces like Dorothy's," said Tinker with conviction.
"You seem a perfect well of truth to-day," said Sir Tancred.
They were silent a while, gazing idly over the sea; then Tinker said, "I'm beginning to think that Dorothy is rather mysterious, don't you know. She gets very few letters, but lots of cablegrams, from America. She has lots of money, too, and she spends it. Sometimes I have to talk to her seriously about being extravagant."
"Oh, she laughs. That's what makes me think she's only a governess for fun. I never knew a girl so ready to laugh--though she did cry that morning." He spoke musingly, half to himself.
"What morning was that?" said Sir Tancred quickly.
"It was a few mornings ago," said Tinker vaguely; and he added hastily, "I think I'll go after her and Elsie; they've gone down the Corniche towards Mentone."
"Was it the morning I had an affair with M. le Comte de Puy-de-Dôme?"
"Ye-e-s," said Tinker with some reluctance, and he prepared for trouble. Hitherto his father had said nothing of that timely but eldritch yell. Now, by his careless admission about the tears of Dorothy, he had opened the matter, and let himself in for a rating.
But Sir Tancred was silent, musing, and Tinker returned to his idle consideration of the Mediterranean.
Presently he said, "She would make you a nice little wife, sir."
Sir Tancred started. "There are times," he said, "when I feel you would take my breath away, if I hadn't very good lungs."
"I thought that that was what you were thinking about," said the ingenuous Tinker.
"If you add thought-reading to your other accomplishments, it will be too much," said Sir Tancred with conviction.
Of a sudden there came bustling round the right-hand horn of the bay a most disreputable, bedraggled-looking vessel. By her lines a yacht, her decks would have been a disgrace to the oldest and most battered tin-pot of an ocean tramp. Her masts had gone, there were gaps in her bulwarks, and the smoke of her furnaces, pouring through a hole in her deck over which her funnel had once reared itself, had taken advantage of this rare and golden opportunity to blacken her after-part to a very fair semblance of imitation ebony, and to transform her crew to an even fairer imitation of negroes dressed in black.