Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/311

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CAPTAIN CHRISTY
297

The girl perched on his elbow-chair, the white head and the brown tousled together.

"So I want ye to hev this. I'd saved it for her, waitin' for her to grow up,—like you."

The proffered book, a little black Bible, opened at the fly-leaf. Above a date forty years old, they read, in the captain's crabbed antique hand:—


For Eunice Christy
from her loving father.
"Man cannot live
by bread alone." Matt, iv, 4.
"I would have you wise
unto that which is good, and
simple concerning evil.' ' Ro-
mans xvi, 19.


"Oh, Father Captain," faltered the girl, between long silences. She stroked the hard old hands, corded with veins, tattooed with the blue quincunx. "I 'll feel better about your going away, now you 've left me this."

"No, girl," he said gravely. "Ye don't understand. This goes with ye, to steer by when you 're famous, and a great lady, and all."