"Perhaps I will," she answered.
"Perhaps!" I repeated. "That isn't any answer at all."
"Yes, then!" she said quickly, and, disengaging her hand from my
arm, ran back a few steps.
"I hear Papa's wheels," she cried over her shoulder, "and, don't
forget, Fyles, dinner at seven-thirty!"
THE GOLDEN CASTAWAYS
All I did was to pull him out by the seat of the trousers. The fat
old thing had gone out in the dark to the end of the yacht's boat-
boom, and was trying to worry in the dinghy with his toe, when
plump he dropped into a six-knot ebb tide. Of course, if I hadn't
happened along in a launch, he might have drowned, but, as for
anything heroic on my part--why, the very notion is preposterous.
The whole affair only lasted half a minute, and in five he was
aboard his yacht and drinking hot Scotch in a plush dressing-gown.
It was natural that his wife and daughter should be frightened,
and natural, too, I suppose, that when they had finished crying
over him they should cry over me. He had taken a chance with the
East River, and it had been the turn of a hair whether he floated
down the current a dead grocer full of brine, or stood in that
cabin, a live one full of grog. Oh, no! I am not saying a word
against THEM. But as for Grossensteck himself, he ought really to
have known better, and it makes me flush even now to recall his
monstrous perversion of the truth. He called me a hero to my face.
He invented details to which my dry clothes gave the lie direct.
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