"Jing, you gave me a scare, Dan!" said Freddy, drawing a long breath of relief. "I thought you had dropped overboard."

"Overboard!" scoffed Dan. "You must think I'm a ninny. And you have been sleeping sure! Got to keep this sort of thing up all summer?"

"Oh, no, no!" said Freddy; "only for a few days,--until I get real well and strong; though Brother Bart will keep fussing over me, I know. Golly, I wish we had Uncle Tom along with us!"

"All right, is he?" asked Dan.

"Great!" replied Freddy, emphatically. "Doesn't baby you a bit; lets you row and swim and dive when you go off with him. Most as good as a real father."

"Just as good, I guess," amended Dan.

"No," said Freddy, shaking his head. "You see, he has other work--preaching and saying Mass and giving missions--where I don't come in. He has to leave me at Saint Andrew's because he hasn't any home. It must be just fine to have a home that isn't a school,--a sort of cosy little place, with cushioned chairs, and curtains, and a fire that you can see, and a kitchen where you can roast nuts and apples and smell gingerbread baking, and a big dog that would be your very own. But you can't have a home like that when you have a priest uncle like mine."

"No, you can't," agreed Dan, his thoughts turning to Aunt Winnie and her blue teapot, and the little rooms that, despite all the pinch and poverty, she had made home.

"And Christmas," went on Freddy, both young speakers being quite oblivious of the big stranger who had seated himself on a camp stool in the shelter of the projecting cabin, and, with folded arms resting on the deck rail, was apparently studying the distant horizon,--"I'd like to have one real right Christmas before I get too big for it."

"Seems to me you have a pretty good time as it is," remarked Dan: "new skates and sled, and five dollars pocket money. There wasn't a fellow at the school of your age had any more."

"That's so," said Freddy; "but they went home. A fellow doesn't want pocket money when he goes home. Dick Fenton had only sixty cents; I lent him fifteen more to get a card-case for his mother. But he had Christmas all right, you bet: a tree that went to the ceiling (he helped to cut it down himself); all the house 'woodsy' with wreaths and berries and fires,--real fires where you could pop corn and roast apples. He lives in the country, you see, where money doesn't count; for you can't buy a real Christmas; it has to be homemade," said Freddy, with a little sigh. "So I'll never have one, I know."

Then the great gong sounded again to announce supper; and both boys bounded away to find the rest of their crowd, leaving the big stranger still seated in the gathering darkness, looking out to sea. As the boyish footsteps died into silence, he bowed his head upon his hands, and his breast heaved with a long, shuddering breath as if some dull, slumbering pain had wakened into life again. Then, in fierce self-mastery, he rose, stretched his tall form to its full height, and, ascending to the upper deck, began to pace its dimming length with the stern, swift tread of one whose life is a restless, joyless march through a desert land.

Meanwhile Brother Bart and his boys had begun to feel the roll of the sea, and to realize that supper had been a mistake. Jim and Dud had retired to their staterooms, with unpleasant memories of Minnie Foster's chocolates, and the firm conviction that they never wanted to see a candy box again. Brother Bart was ministering to a very white-faced "laddie," and thanking Heaven he was in the state of grace and prepared for the worst.

"The Lord's will be done, but I don't think any of us will live to see the morning. There must have been some poison in the food, to take us all suddint like this."

"Oh, no, Brother Bart!" gasped Freddy, faintly. "I've been this way before. We're all just--just seasick, Brother Bart--dead seasick."

Even Dan had a few qualms,--just enough to send him, with the sturdy sense of his rough kind, out into the widest sweep of briny air within his reach. He made for a flight of stairs that led up into some swaying, starlit region where there were no other sufferers, and flung himself upon a pile of life-preservers that served as a pillow for his dizzy head. Sickness of any sort was altogether new to Dan, and he felt it would be some relief to groan out his present misery unheard. But the glow of a cigar, whose owner was pacing the deck, suddenly glimmered above his head, and the big man in corduroy nearly stumbled over him.

"Hello!" he said. "Down and out, my boy? Here, take a swig of this!" and he handed out a silver-mounted flask.

"No," said Dan, faintly, "--can't. I've taken the pledge."

"Pooh! Don't be a fool, boy, when you're sick!"

"Wouldn't touch it if I were dying," said Dan. "I'm getting better now, anyhow. My, but I felt queer for a while! It is so hot and stuffy below. No more packing in on a shelf for me. I'll stick it out here until morning."

"And the others,--the little chap who was with you?" the stranger asked hastily. "Is he--he sick, too?"

"Freddy Neville? Yes, dead sick; but Brother Bart is looking out for him. Brother Bart is a regular old softy about Freddy. He took him when he was a little kid and keeps babying him yet."

"He is good to him, you mean?" asked the other, eagerly.

"Good? Well, I suppose you'd call it good. I couldn't stand any such fussing. Why, when Fred got a tumble in the gym the other day the old man almost had a fit!"

"A tumble,--a fall; did it hurt him much?" There was a strange sharpness in the questioner's voice.

"Pooh, no!" said Dan. "Just knocked him out a little. But we were all getting into trouble at Saint Andrew's, for vacation there is pretty slow; so Father Regan has sent us off to the seashore for the summer?"

"The seashore? Where?"

"Some queer place calle............