After they had discussed the bombardment and the landing, the prospects of more fighting and the possibility of a blockade, and had laughed till their sides ached at the oddities and eccentricities brought out by the unusual situation, McLeod said suddenly:
"Say, Doc, you have not told me anything about the Highland girl. How is she?"
"What! Have you not been getting along well?"
"Why? I thought from the way she spoke of you, and the way she received you when you came back from Keelung, that things were bound to go like a house on fire."
"Well, Mac, for a few days I was feeling pretty good myself. I thought that I was making great progress. But the day of the first bombardment my castle in the air was blown sky-high and there has hardly a fragment of it come back to earth yet."
He then told of the tennis game and of how disgusted with himself he had been. To his surprise McLeod did not take it very seriously. He expressed concern at Sinclair's narrow escape from the shell, but rather laughed about the rest of the incident, especially at his friend's having left the lawn in a tantrum, as he called it.
"You would have been madder than I was," retorted Sinclair, "if you had been in my place."
"Of course I should--if I had been in your place, because like you I should not have looked for the right reason for her actions--that is, if I had been in your place."
"I don't understand what you are driving at," said Sinclair, with a trace of irritation.
"It's all right, Doc. Never mind now. Go on and tell us some more."
When Sinclair related the incident of the "charge of the Tamsui blues," and Gorman's remarks to Carteret, McLeod laughed so heartily that the doctor had to join him.
"It's all very well for you to laugh like that," he said, a little ruefully, when McLeod stopped for a moment. "You have nothing at stake. But it's different with me."
"You'll laugh about it yet, just as heartily as I have done. Probably more so. Haven't you another yarn up your sleeve? I know that you have. Go on. Give us another."
He did. He told about Clark praying under the teak table, and De Vaux dancing and stuttering around it. Sinclair was a good story-teller, and before he was through with the Free Methodist prayer-meeting McLeod's laughter could be heard the length of the ship. Sinclair had forgotten his love troubles, and his laugh, mingled with his chum's, was as rollicking and care-free as that of a schoolboy.