Occasionally he would accompany them on the water, but not often.

He had a notion that Seton preferred his absence, and he would not go where he felt himself to be an intruder.
Nevertheless, the primary fascination had not ceased to act upon him; the glamour of the girl's beauty was still in his eyes something more than earthly.

And there came a time when Bernard Merefleet listened with unconscious craving for the high, unmodulated voice, and smiled with a tender indulgence over the curiously naive audacity which once had made him shrink.
As for Mab, she was too eagerly interested in various matters to give more than a passing thought to the fact that the man she called Big Bear had laid aside his surliness.

If she thought about it at all, it was only to conclude that their daily intercourse had worn away the outer crust of his shyness.
She was always busy--in and out of the fishermen's cottages, where she was welcomed as an angel--to and fro on a hundred schemes, all equally interesting and equally absorbing.

And Merefleet was called upon to assist.