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. “To have twenty people on the _qui vive_ for a boat and then disappoint them with that silly prank,--it is out of the question.” “It was no prank,--he meant no harm,” said Paula in abashed discomfiture. “I had told him to watch for a boat merely to keep him out of the way. I didn’t think to explain that it was to be a steamboat for us to board.” “Then you ought to have more consideration for other people,” Floyd-Rosney fumed. His strong point was scarcely altruism, but he probably felt the misadventure even more sensibly than any of the others, for he was accustomed to lording it in a fine style and in a fine sphere. There was no lack of indicia of displeasure among the thwarted travelers as they strolled in baffled irritation up and down the stone floor of the portico, and gazed along the glittering river at the slow approach of the shanty-boat, now drifting as noiselessly and apparently as aimlessly on the lustrous surface as a sere leaf on a gust of wind, and now, with its great sweeps, working to keep the current from carrying it in and grounding it on the bank. The old lady who had entertained fears of the insane man was both peevishly outspoken and addicted to covert innuendo.