"No." To the fanciful girl the monosyllable came like one toll from a low tower. She laughed.
"Basile says there's another thing you suffer from."
"From everybody else on the boat having a better chance to do things--big things--than you have."
He smiled again. "If I did, no one should know it; least of all you."
She ignored the last clause. "Aha! I said so. I told him--and mammy Joy told him--there's nothing bigger than to wait your turn and _then take it_. And there ain't--there isn't, is there?"
"Well--even that can be small. Nothing a man is big enough for looks big to him."
"Hoh!--after he's done it," laughed Ramsey.
"True--" said Hugh reflectively, "or suffered it," and both of them began to see that we can rarely lift more than our one corner of the whole truth at a time. "In your way," he added, still musing, "you're larger than I."
"Oh, I'm no--such--thing!" Her speech was soft, yet she looked up warily to Watson's pilot-house window, but Watson too thoroughly approved to be looking down. "I'm not half or third or quarter as large." She eagerly turned his attention up the river. Visible only by the lights of her cabin and the sparks from her unseen chimneys, a boat was coming round the next bend. As she entered the reach and breasted the breeze which so calmly accompanied the _Votaress_, her two spangled plumes of smoke swept straight astern as if two comets raced with her, or----
"The Golden Locks of Berenice," whispered Ramsey.
"Come," Hugh softly responded. The _Votaress_ had signalled the usual passage to starboard and unless they went forward the shining spectacle would at once be lost. As they gained the front of the texas the distant craft, happening to open a fire-door, cast a long fan of red light ahead of her, suddenly showing every detail of her white forecastle, illumining her pathway on the yellow waters and revealing in their daylight green the willows of an island close beyond. Then the furnace was shut and again her fair outlines were left to the imagination, except for the prismatic twinkle and glow of her cabin lights.
"That was like you when you laugh," murmured Hugh, and before she could parry she was smitten again by an innocent random shot from the darkness round the bell.