“The packet must be rounding the point,” said Floyd-Rosney hopefully.
“Did you see the smoke above the trees, darling?” Paula called out to the eager little man, now racing joyfully about the balcony, now pausing to point at an object in the offing with his tiny forefinger.
Marjorie, leaning on the iron rail, was gazing with eager eyes in vain search.
“It seems to me that we ought to be able to see the boat from the portico as soon as he can from the balcony,” said the broker.
An adequate reason was presently presented for the advantage of the balcony as an outlook, lifted so high above the portico.
The boat lay very flat on the surface,--a shanty-boat!
“Why, Eddie,” cried Marjorie, with an inflection of poignant disappointment,--she, too, had been looking for the towering chimneys, the coil of black smoke, backward blown in the smooth progress of a packet, the white guards, the natty little pilot-house, and only casually she had chanced to descry the tiny flat object drifting with the current that carried it far in toward the point. “That is a shanty-boat,--we don’t travel on that kind of boat.”
The child’s pink and white face was crestfallen in a moment. Language seemed to fail him as he gazed disconsolate. Then he sought reassurance. “Him _is_ a boat,” he declared with his pointing forefinger, so small in contrast with the vast spaces he sought to index. “Him _is_ a boat, _ain’t him_, mamma?”
“Him is, indeed, a boat,” cried out Paula. “Never mind,” for little Ned’s head was drooping, “we shall get a bigger boat presently. And it was you that saw the first one!”
“Get him down from there, Paula,” said Floyd-Rosney, greatly discomposed. “Set him at some other mischief, for God’s sake,--anything but this.”
“He is coming now,” she answered, glimpsing the rueful little face through the balusters of the stairs within, and, presently, the whole diminutive figure came into view as he descended, always the right foot first, and only one step at a time, so high were the intervals for his fat baby legs.
“The poor child,” Paula suddenly exclaimed, the tears springing. “There just seems to be no place for him.”
Floyd-Rosney obviously felt the rebuke. He winced for a moment. Then he justified himself.