“All right,” said the stranger, in a voice that you didn’t seem to notice while he was speaking, but that you remembered afterwards like the ring of any silver thing that has been thrown down; and he dropped his hat on the floor and drew near the fireplace, warming hands that were slender and brown, but shapely as a woman’s. I was taking up the supper; so I only gave him a glance or two, and saw him standing there, his left hand extended to the blaze, and his eye resting lightly and then earnestly on Faith in her pretty sleep, and turning away much as one turns from a picture. At length I came to ask him to sit by, and at that moment Faith’s eyes opened. Faith always woke up just as a baby does, wide and bewildered, and the fire had flushed her cheeks, and her hair was disordered, and she fixed her gaze on him as if he had stepped out of her dream, her lips half parted and then curling in a smile; but in a second he moved off with me, and Faith slipped down and into the little bedroom. Well, we didn’t waste many words until father’d lost the edge of his appetite, and then I told about Faith. “’F that don’t beat the Dutch!” said father. “Here’s Mr.——Mr.——” “Gabriel,” said the stranger. “Yes,——Mr. Gabriel Verelay been served the same trick by the same squall, only worse and more of it,——knocked off the yacht——What’s that you call her?” “La belle Louise.” “And left for drowned,——if they see him go at all. But he couldn’t ’a’ sinked in that sea, if he’d tried. He kep’ afloat; we blundered into him; and here he is.” Dan and I looked round in considerable surprise, for he was dry as an August leaf. “O,” said the stranger, coloring, and with the least little turn of his words, as if he didn’t always speak English, “the good capitain reached shore, and, finding sticks, he kindled a fire, and we did dry our clothes until it made fine weather once more.” “Yes,” said father; “but ’t wouldn’t been quite such fine weather, I reckon, if this’d gone to the fishes!” And he pushed something across the table.