from the yards and stays, her hull with painted ports and carved bow and
stern mirrored in the level sea. There was the _Albacore_ running through
the northeast trades with royals and all her weather studding sails set.
Farther along the _Pallas Athena_, in heavy weather off the Cape of Good
Hope, was being driven hard across the Agulhas Bank under double-reefed
topsails, reefed courses, the fore-topmast staysail and spanker, with the
westerly current breaking in an ugly cross sea, but, as her grandfather
always explained, setting the ship thirty or forty miles to windward in a
day. She lingered, finally, over the _Metacom_, running her easting down
far to the southward with square yards under a close-reefed maintop sail,
double-reefed foresail and forestaysail, dead before a gale and gigantic
long seas hurling the ship on in the bleak watery desolation.

Laurel was closely concerned in all these. One cause for this was the
fact that her grandfather so often selected her as the audience for his
memories and stories, during which his manner was completely that of one
navigator to another; and a second flourished in the knowledge that
Camilla affected to disdain the sea and any of its connections.

Sidsall appeared and took her place with a collective greeting; while
Laurel, coming out of her abstraction, realized that they were discussing
the subject in which nearly every conversation now began or ended--the
solemn speculation of why her Uncle Gerrit Ammidon, master of the ship
_Nautilus_, was so long overdue from China. Laurel heard this from two
angles, or, otherwise, when her grandfather was or was not present, the
tone of the first far more encouraging than that of the latter. Her
father was speaking:

"My opinion is that he was unexpectedly held up at Shanghai. It's a new
port for us, and, Captain Verney tells me, very difficult to make: after