determined to ask him to-morrow. She liked his stories, that Camilla
disdained, about crews and Hong Kong and the stormy Cape. The thought of
Cape Horn brought back the memory of her Uncle Gerrit, absent in the
ship _Nautilus_. Her mental pictures of him were not clear--he was
almost always at sea--but she remembered his eyes, which were very
confusing to encounter, and his hair parted and carelessly brushing the
bottoms of his ears.

Laurel recalled hearing that Gerrit was his father's favorite, and she
suddenly understood something of the unhappiness that weighed upon the
old man. She hoped desperately that Janet or Camilla wouldn't come in and
laugh at her for crying. In bed she saw that the room was rapidly filling
with dusk. Only yesterday she would have told herself that the dragon in
the teakwood chair was stirring; but now Laurel could see that it never
moved. She rocked like the little boats that crossed the harbor or came
in from the ships anchored beyond the wharves, and settled into a sleep
like a great placid sea flooding the world of her home and the
lamplighter and her grandfather sorrowing for Uncle Gerrit.




II

When Jeremy Ammidon sent his granddaughter home alone, and turned toward
Captain Dunsack's, on Hardy Street, he stopped for a moment to approve
the diminishing sturdy figure. All William's children, though they were
girls, were remarkably handsome, with glowing red cheeks and clear eyes,
tumbling masses of hair and a generous vigor of body. He sighed at
Laurel's superabundant youth, and moved carefully forward; he was very