Olive remembered hearing Marvin say that he did not believe there was another mariner upon the Massachusetts coast who could have “pulled off that rescue” with the sea as it was then. She thrilled again, looking up into the keen blue eye under the heavy lid, into the face which had made Jessica think of sheltering flame. At the same time, she could not help seeing a gulf—a broad gulf with floating shapes of fishy decks, horny hands, scaly oilskins—intervene between her and her sister, daughters of the bi-millionaire owner of big machine works for the manufacture of textile machinery, and this limping weather-beaten master mariner.
Sybil did not even take the trouble to be as friendly as she was.
Meanwhile Cousin Anne, Miss Anne Winter, was introducing Captain Andy Davis in proper form to Arline and Sally, mentioning the fact that the grateful Marvin had taken her to visit him when last she was in Gloucester.
“Oh, I must have felt it in my fingers—or in my tongue—that I knew you, or ought to know you, or that somebody here knew you, or I never would have talked to you so freely!” declared Sally in an orange flutter.
“And how do you come to be in Clevedon just now?” questioned Miss Anne, interrogating the weather-beaten face.
“My artist sent for me.” That florid visage bloomed all over with a boyish smile that gleamed somewhat shamefacedly through the thick, fair eyelashes, not yet turned grey. “She said she hadn’t got my ground colors right—gee! I didn’t know I had any, except when my vessel was grounded in the mud. ‘Carnation colors’ she called ’em—jiminy!”
His breezy bubble of laughter was caught and tossed further by Sally and Arline who eagerly hung upon the novelty of his speech.
“The artist is Miss Loretta Dewey, isn’t she?” So Miss Anne took him up. “She has taken you for the subject of her sea picture: ‘The Breaker King.’”
“Yes. I’m highly flattered. I had other business in this city, too, besides fixing my carnation colors,” with again that boyish laugh stirring the thick eyelashes. “I’ve been in correspondence with a lady here, a cousin of the artist’s, about renting one of my new camps at the mouth of the Exmouth River—tidal river, you know—for the summer.” (Sally caught her breath as if she were fishing for it, rose on tiptoe, stared at him breathlessly.) “The fact is, Miss Winter, I’m tired of being a hayseed,” the ex-mariner went on—“tried it for two years an’ couldn’t take to it.”