“But I think you know it already better than I do,” said Rosey with a smile.

Mr. Renshaw’s brow clouded slightly.  “Ah,” he said, with a touch of his former restraint; “and why?”

“Well,” said Rosey timidly, “I thought you went round and touched things in a familiar way as if you had handled them before.”

The young man raised his eyes to Rosey’s and kept them there long enough to bring back his gentler expression.  “Then, because I found you trying on a very queer bonnet the first day I saw you,” he said, mischievously, “I ought to believe you were in the habit of wearing one.”

In the first flush of mutual admiration young people are apt to find a laugh quite as significant as a sigh for an expression of sympathetic communion, and this master-stroke of wit convulsed them both.  In the midst of it Mr. Nott entered the cabin.  But the complacency with which he viewed the evident perfect understanding of the pair was destined to suffer some abatement.  Rosey, suddenly conscious that she was in some way participating in the ridicule of her father through his unhappy gift, became embarrassed.  Mr. Renshaw’s restraint returned with the presence of the old man.  In vain, at first, Abner Nott strove with profound levity to indicate his arch comprehension of the situation, and in vain, later, becoming alarmed, he endeavored, with cheerful gravity, to indicate his utter obliviousness of any but a business significance in their tete-a-tete.

“I oughtn’t to hev intruded, Rosey,” he said, “when you and the gentleman were talkin’ of contracts, mebbee; but don’t mind me.  I’m on the fly, anyhow, Rosey dear, hevin’ to see a man round the corner.”

But even the attitude of withdrawing did not prevent the exit of Renshaw to his apartment and of Rosey to the galley.  Left alone in the cabin, Abner Nott felt in the knots and tangles of his beard for a reason.  Glancing down at his prodigious boots, which, covered with mud and gravel, strongly emphasized his agricultural origin, and gave him a general appearance of standing on his own broad acres, he was struck with an idea.  “It’s them boots,” he whispered to himself, softly; “they somehow don’t seem ’xactly to trump or follow suit in this yer cabin; they don’t hitch into anythin’ but jist slosh round loose, and so to speak play it alone.  And them young critters nat’rally feels it and gets out o’ the way.”  Acting upon this instinct with his usual precipitate caution, he at once proceeded to the nearest second-hand shop, and, purchasing a pair of enormous carpet slippers, originally the property of a gouty sea-captain, reappeared with a strong suggestion of newly upholstering the cabin.  The improvement, however, was fraught with a portentous circumstance.  Mr. Nott’s footsteps, which usually announced his approach all over the ship, became stealthy and inaudible.