"Croaker brought you that?" he gasped. "Well, I'll be shot!" Billy stood up and gazed about him. "Where's Croaker now?" he asked.,
"I know," she continued, still preserving her accent of scorn and viewing him with eyes that did not seem to be her's, so did she contrive to diminish the breadth of the beauty of the lids, so did she manage to look passions and feelings which the memory of her oldest friend could never have recalled as vitalising her brooding half-hooded gaze: "I know that this man came ashore and lived[Pg 284] upon his father who was poor, and drank and gambled until his name provoked nothing but a shrug, and that one day in a fit of pity, for which doubtless he has asked God's pardon, Captain Acton, who loves Admiral Lawrence, gave his poor creature of a son command of a ship. This I know," she said, letting her eyes fall suddenly from his face down upon her fingers, which she seemed to count as she proceeded. "But I had always supposed that there was some spirit of goodness left in Mr Walter Lawrence. I believed that though he might gamble and drink and live in idleness upon the bounty of his father, he with all his imperfections was a man incapable of outraging the feelings of a young girl, incapable of betraying the generous confidence of one who stood to him as a warm-hearted friend. Can you be that Mr Lawrence?" she said, peering at him in such a peculiar fashion, with such archness of contempt that a spectator, short-sighted and at a little distance, would have supposed she was looking at the handsome fellow through an eye-glass. "Oh, I am going mad to suppose it—mad to think it possible!",
About this time the breeze began to freshen. The horizon slightly thickened with some windy change in the atmosphere and with the shadow of the evening. The Minorca under all plain sail heeled into the white smother of spume alongside, and as she sprang crushed the surge with her round weather-bow till the bright brine sometimes leapt like a fountain athwart the forecastle. Mr Lawrence watched her behaviour with attention, and often sent a look at the creaming road of wake which was so brilliant and long that, as the shadow deepened, the tail of it was lost to view..
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