After all, sudden as the slipping into so divine a dream had been, it had need to be full as intense and deep, for it was only for a little while it lasted.  A week’s rapt walking in these mid-heavens, where earth and care and each to-morrow was forgotten, and there broke in upon them the voice of the Sabrina’s owner seeking for Andrew Traverse.

Of course such conduct as that of one who preferred to do his utmost to save a sinking ship rather than seek safety with her flying crew, was something too unusual to go unrewarded:  it must be signalized into such a shining light that all other mariners must needs follow it.  And if the sky had fallen, Andrew declared, he could have been no more surprised than he was when he found himself invited with great ceremony to a stately tea-drinking at the house of the owner of the Sabrina.  “Now we shall catch larks,” said he; and dressed in a new suit, whose gray tint set off the smoothness of his tanned cheek with the color sometimes mantling through the brown, he entered the house with all the composure of a gentleman used to nothing but high days and holidays.  Not that either the state or ceremony at Mr. Maurice’s required great effort to encounter with composure—­trivial enough at its best, wonderful though it was to the townsfolk, unused to anything beyond.  But Andrew had seen the world in foreign parts, and neither Mr. Maurice’s mansion-house and gardens, nor his gay upholstery, nor his silver tea-service, nor his condescending manners, struck the least spark of’ surprise from Andrew’s eyes, or gave them the least shadow of awe.

“This is some mistake,” said the owner graciously, after preliminary compliment had been duly observed.  “How is it that you are rated on the books as a boy—­you as much a man as you will ever be?”

“A long voyage, sir, slow sailing and delays over so many disasters as befell us, three years out in the stead of a year and a half—­all that brings one to man’s estate before his reckoning.”

“But the last part of the time you must have done able seaman’s service?”

“The captain and I together,” said Andrew with his bright laugh.  “We were officers and crew and passengers, cox’n and cook, as they say.”

“A hard experience,” said Mr. Maurice.

“Oh, not at all, but worth its weight in gold—­to me, at least.  Why, sir, it taught me how to handle a ship as six years before the mast couldn’t have done.”

“Good!  We shall see to what purpose one of these days.  And you have had your share of schooling, they tell me?”

“All that the academy had to give, sir.”

“And that’s enough for any one who has the world to tussel with.  How should you like to have gone through such hard lines, Frarnie?” turning to his daughter, a pale, moon-faced girl, her father’s darling.

“Were you never afraid?” she asked in her pretty simpering way.

“Not to say afraid,” answered Andrew, deferentially.  “We knew our danger—­two men alone in the leaky, broken brig—­but then we could be no worse off than we were before; and as for the others—­”