little slowly.

"We want to engage a boat and a man to take us out. Do you know of one?
Have you a boat?"

The young fellow glanced down across the wall where a hull and mast
gleamed indistinctly through the falling night, swinging at the side of
the quay. "That's mine, yonder," he said, nodding toward it. And then,
with the graceful, engaging frankness that I already knew as his, "I
shall be very glad to take you out"--including us both in his glance.

"Sally," I said, five minutes later, as we trudged up the one steep,
rocky street of Clovelly,--the picturesque old street that once led
English smugglers to their caves, and that is more of a staircase than a
street, with rows of stone steps across its narrow width--"Sally, you
are a very unexpected girl. You took my breath away, engaging that man
so suddenly to take us sailing to-morrow. How do you know he is
reliable? It would have been safer to try one of the men they
recommended from the Inn. And certainly it would have been more
dignified to let me make the arrangements. You seem to forget that I am
older than you."

"You aren't," said Sully, giving a squeeze to my arm that she held in
the angle of hers, pushing me with her young strength up the hill.
"You're not as old, cousin Mary. I'm twenty-two, and you're only
eighteen, and I believe you will never be any older."

I think perhaps I like flattery. I am a foolish old woman, and I have
noticed that it is not the young girls who treat me with great deference
and rise as soon as I come who seem to me the most charming, but the
ones who, with proper manners, of course, yet have a touch of
comradeship, as if they recognized in me something more than a fossil
exhibit. I like to have them go on talking about their beaux and their
work and play, and let me talk about it, too. Sally Meade makes me feel
always that there is in me an undying young girl who has outlived all of
my years and is her friend and equal.

"I'm sorry if I was forward, cousin Mary, but the sailing is to be my
party, you know, and then I thought you liked him. He had a pretty
manner for a common sailor, didn't he? And his voice--these low-class
English people have wonderfully well-bred, soft voices. I suppose it's
particularly so here in the South. Cousin Mary, did you see the look he
gave you with those delicious dark eyes? It's always the way--gentleman
or hod-carrier--no one has a chance with men when you are about."

It is pleasant to me,