Still she waited in that shuddering suspense, with every nerve so
tightly strung, that voice or footfall vibrated on them into pain. If
Andrew, in the midst of the gayeties by which he found himself accepted of
the Maurices' friends, was never haunted by any thought of all this, his
heart had grown stouter in one year's time than twenty years had found and
left it previously.
But Louie's suspense was of no long duration, as time goes, though to her
it was a lifetime. A week covered it--a week full of stings and fevered
restlessness--when her father came in one day and said bitterly, thinking
it best to make an end of all at once: "So I hear that a friend of ours
has been paid off at last. Captain Andrew Traverse of the Sabrina is going
to marry his owner's daughter Frarnie. Luck will take passage on that
brig!" And when Louie rose from the bed on which she lay down that night,
the Sabrina had been a fortnight gone on her long voyage--a voyage where
the captain had sailed alone, postponing the evil day perhaps, and at any
rate pleading too much inexperience, for all his dazzling promotion, to be
trusted with so precious thing as a wife on board during the first trip.
He had not felt that hesitation once when portraying the possibilities of
the voyage to another.
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