VIII.


After dinner, nature avenged herself in the young men for their vigils
of the night before, when they had stayed up so late, parting with
friends, that they had found themselves early risers without having
been abed. They both slept so long that Dunham, leaving Staniford to
a still unfinished nap, came on deck between five and six o'clock.

Lydia was there, wrapped against the freshening breeze in a red
knit shawl, and seated on a stool in the waist of the ship, in the
Evangeline attitude, and with the wistful, Evangeline look in her
face, as she gazed out over the far-weltering sea-line, from which
all trace of the shore had vanished. She seemed to the young man very
interesting, and he approached her with that kindness for all other
women in his heart which the lover feels in absence from his beloved,
and with a formless sense that some retribution was due her from
him for the roughness with which Staniford had surmised her natural
history. Women had always been dear and sacred to him; he liked,
beyond most young men, to be with them; he was forever calling upon
them, getting introduced to them, waiting upon them, inventing little
services for them, corresponding with them, and wearing himself out
in their interest. It is said that women do not value men of this sort
so much as men of some other sorts. It was long, at any rate, before
Dunham--whom people always called Charley Dunham--found the woman who
thought him more lovely than every other woman pronounced him; and
naturally Miss Hibbard was the most exacting of her sex. She required