"I've done some yachting--yes." "Yachting!" said Nell. "This isn't yachting. You must feel a kind of contempt for our poor old tub." "Not at all; she's a good boat, I can see," he said. Nell took up the oars, but she had to pull only a few strokes, for the wind soon filled the sail, and the _Annie Laurie_, as if piqued by the things that had been said of her, sprang forward before the wind. Nell shipped the oars, looked up at the sail, and glanced at Vernon, who had taken his seat in the stern, and got hold of the tiller with an accustomed air. "Make for the Head," she said. "I'll get the lines ready." There was silence for a minute or two while she baited the lines and paid them out, and Vernon watched her with a kind of absent-minded interest. She was quite intent on her work, and he felt that, so far as she was concerned, he might have been old Brownie, or the rheumatic Willy, or her brother Dick; and something in her girlish indifference to his presence and personality impressed him; for Drake, Viscount Selbie, was not accustomed to be passed over as a nonentity by the women in whose company he chanced to be. "That ought to fetch them," she said, eying the baited line with an air of satisfaction. "You might keep her to the wind a little more, Mr. Vernon; she can carry all we've got, and more." "Aye, aye!" he responded, in sailor fashion. "You only did her bare justice, Miss Lorton," he added. "She's a good boat." Nell looked round at him with a gratified smile. "She's a dear old thing, really," she said; "and she behaves like an angel in a gale. Many's the time Dick and I have sailed her when half the other boats were afraid to leave the harbor." "Wasn't that rather dangerous, a tempting of Providence?" he said, rather gravely, at the thought of the peril incurred by these two thoughtless children--for what else were they? "Oh, I don't know," she replied carelessly. "We know every inch of the coast and every current, and if it should ever come on too stiff, we should make for the open. It would have to be a bad sea to sink the _Annie Laurie_; and if we came to grief----Well, we can die but once, you know; and, after all, there are meaner ways of slipping off the mortal coil than doing it in a hurricane off Windy Head. There's the first fish! If Brownie were here, we should 'wet it'; but I haven't any whisky to offer you." Her low but clear laugh rang musical over the billowing water, and she nodded at her companion as if he were one of the fishing men or Dick. Vernon leaned back and gazed in turn at the sea and the sky and the slim, girlish form and beautiful face, and half unconsciously his mind concentrated itself upon her. She was not the first young girl he had known, but she was quite unlike any young girl he had hitherto met. He could recall none so free and frank and utterly unselfconscious.