"Ah," said Adelaide, coming up on to the bridge with her head half-enveloped in a fleecy shawl, "quicken up. Does that mean what you call full speed?"
"Something like it, I reckon," said Miss Chrysie, coming up close behind her, followed by Lady Olive, both with white yachting caps pinned more or less securely on to their abundant tresses.
"Yes," said Hardress, with a note in his voice that Adelaide had not heard before; "it is full speed. Now, hold on to your headgear and you'll see."
As he spoke he put his hand on the handle of the engine telegraph and pulled it over from half to full speed. They heard a tinkle in the engine-room, and presently the bridge began to throb and thump under their feet. The sharp prow of the _Nadine_ had so far been cleaving the water with scarcely a ripple. Now it seemed to leap forward into it, and raised a long creased swirl to left and right. A sudden blast of wind struck their faces, hands instinctively went up to heads, and Lady Olive exclaimed:
"What is that, Shafto? It hasn't suddenly come on to blow, has it?"
"Oh no," he laughed. "We're making it blow. That's only the difference between about ten or eleven knots and twenty--and there's a bit of a breeze against us, about five miles an hour--so that makes it twenty-five miles an hour--in fact, even thirty--for knots are longer than miles."
"Now isn't that just gorgeous!" said Miss Chrysie, and she opened her mouth and filled her lungs with the strong salt breath of the sea--"and there goes my cap," she said, when she got her breath again.
The breeze had got under the peak of her yachting cap, and sent it flying aft. The pin dislocated the arrangement of her hair, and the next moment she was standing with the loosened shining coils streaming out behind her, unravelling into a shower of golden glory. Adelaide, with the instinct of a Frenchwoman, had drawn her shawl tight round her head. Hardress looked round at the moment, and, if his heart had ever wavered, in that moment the old allegiance was confirmed. There was no more comparison between the tall, deep-chested American girl, with her cheeks glowing, her eyes shining in the sheer joy of physical life, and her long gold-brown hair streaming away behind her, and the slight, shrinking figure of the daughter of the Bourbons, cowering behind the canvas of the bridge and gripping the shawl that covered her head, than there might have been between a sea-nymph of the old Grecian legends and a fine lady of to-day caught in an unexpected gust of wind.