A marine engine requires
to be perpetually tinkered, and an engineer's duty is not only to
run it, but to make good the little defects and breakdowns that
are constantly occurring. Frank was a daily visitor at the local
machine-shop, and his business engagements with Mr. Derwent, the
proprietor, led insensibly to others of the social kind.
Derwent's house was close by his works, and Frank's trips ashore
soon began to take in both. Derwent had a daughter, a black-
haired, black-eyed, pink-cheeked girl, named Cassie, one of those
vigorous young English beauties that men would call stunning and
women bold. She did not wait for any preliminaries, but
straightway fell in love with the handsome American engineer that
her father brought home. She made her regard so plain that Frank
was embarrassed, and was not a bit put off at his reluctance to
play the part she assigned to him.
"That's always my luck," she remarked with disarming candour, "a
poor silly fool who always likes them that don't like me and
spurns them that do!" And then she added, with a laugh, that he
ought to be tied up, "for you are a cruel handsome man, Frank, and
my heart goes pitapat at the very sight of you!"
She called him Frank at the second visit; and at the third seated
herself on the arm of his chair and took his hand and held it.
"Can't you ever forget that girl in Yankee-land?" she said. "She
ain't here, is she, and why shouldn't you steal a little harmless
fun? There's men who'd give their little finger to win a kiss from
me--and you sit there so glum and solemn, who could have a bushel
for the asking!"
For all Frank's devotion to Florence he could not but be flattered
at being wooed in this headlong fashion.
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