CHAPTER III.


Salvé came out to the rock again the next autumn, after a voyage to
Liverpool and Havre.

At first he was rather shy, although his father and old Jacob Torungen
had in the interval, in spite of that little affair of the previous
year, been on the best of terms. The white bear, however, as he called
him, seemed to have altogether forgotten what had passed; and with the
girl he was very easily reconciled--she had learnt now not to tell
everything to her grandfather.

Whilst the lighterman and old Jacob enjoyed a heart-warming glass
together in the house, Salvé carried the things up to the cellar,
Elizabeth following him up and down every time, and the conversation
meanwhile going round all the points of the compass, so to speak. After
she had asked him about Havre de Grace, where he had been, and about
America, where he had not been,--if his captain's wife was as fine as a
man-of-war captain's; and then if he wouldn't like one day to marry a
fine lady,--she wanted at last to know, from the laughing sailor lad, if
the officers' wives were ever allowed to be with them in war.

Her face had of late acquired something wonderfully attractive in its
expression--such a seriousness would come over it sometimes, although
she continued as childlike as ever; and such eyes as hers were, at all
events in Salvé's experience, not common. At any rate, after this, he
invariably accompanied his father upon these expeditions.

The last time he was out there he told her about the dances on shore at