They went into a great drawing-room, the barred windows of which
looked out upon a busy street, warehouses and counting houses and
passing sailors. Robert was conscious all the while that the brilliant
blue eyes were examining him minutely. His old wonder about his
parentage, lost for a while in the press of war and exciting events,
returned. He felt intuitively that Master Hardy, like Willet, knew who
and what he was, and he also felt with the same force that neither
would reply to any question of his on the subject. So he kept his
peace and by and by his curiosity, as it always did, disappeared
before immediate affairs.
The drawing-room was a noble apartment, with dark oaken beams, a
polished oaken floor, upon which eastern rugs were spread, and heavy
tables of foreign woods. A small model of a sloop rested upon one
table and a model of a schooner on another. Here and there were great
curving shells with interiors of pink and white, and upon the walls
were curious long, crooked knives of the Malay Islands. Everything
savored of the sea. Again Robert's imagination leaped up. The blazing
hues of distant tropic lands were in his eyes, and the odors of
strange fruits and flowers were in his nostrils.
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