And after a while, though not at first, David’s yarns began to contain a double interest to one of the party—­Miss Fountain.  Those who live to please get to read character at sight, and David, though in these more noble histories he scarcely named himself, was laying a full-length picture of his own mind bare to these keen feminine eyes.  As for old Fountain, he was charmed, and saw nothing more than David showed him outright.  But the women sat flashing secret intelligence backward and forward from eye to eye after the manner of their sex.

“Do you see?” said one lady’s eyes.

“Yes,” replied the other.  “He was concerned in this feat, though he does not say so.”

“Oh, you agree with me?  Then we are right,” replied the first pair of speakers.

“There again:  look; this sailor, whom he describes as a fellow that happened to be ashore at that foreign port with nothing better to do, and who went out with the English smugglers to save the brig when the natives durst not launch a boat?”

“Himself! not a doubt of it.”

And so the blue and hazel lightning went dancing to and fro; ay, even when the tale took a sorrowful turn, and dimmed these bright orbs of intelligence, the lightning struggled through the dew, and David was read and discussed by gleams, and glances, and flashes, without a word spoken.  And he, all unconscious that he sat between a pair of telegraphs, and heating more and more under his great recollections and his hearers’ sympathy, inthralled them with his tuneful voice, his glowing face, his lion eye, and his breathing, burning histories.  Heart to dare and do, yet heart to feel, and brain and tongue to tell a deed well, are rare allies, yet here they met.

He mastered his hearers, and played on their breasts as David played the harp, and perhaps Achilles; Bochsa never, nor any of his tribe.  He made the old man forget his genealogies, his small ambition, his gout, his years, and be a boy again an hour or two in thought, and blood, and early fire.  He made the women’s bosoms pant and swell, and seem to aspire to be the nests and cradles of heroes, and their eyes flash and glisten, and their cheeks flush and grow pale by turns; and the four little papered walls that confined them seemed to fall without noise, and they were away in thought out of a carpeted temple of wax, small talk, nonentity, and nonentities, away to sea-breezes that they almost felt in their hair and round their temples as their hearts rose and fell upon a broad swell of passion, perils, waves, male men, realities.  The spell was at its height, when the sea-wizard’s eye fell on the mantel-piece.  Died in a moment his noble ardor:  “Why, it is eight bells,” said he, servilely; then, doggedly, “time to turn in.”

“Hang that clock!” shouted Mr. Fountain; “I’ll have it turned out of the room.”

Said Lucy, with gentle enthusiasm, “It must be beautiful to be a sailor, and to have seen the real world, and, above all, to be brave and strong like Mr. ——­,. must it not, uncle?” and she looked askant at David’s square shoulders and lion eye, and for the first time in her life there crossed her an undefined instinct that this gentleman must be the male of her species.