Finding that the war was the absorbing topic in this little household, the boy developed new interest in it and the morning passed quickly away.
Jones stayed to lunch and then Mr.Merrick's automobile took them all to the river to visit the beautiful yacht _Arabella_, which was already, they found, attracting a good deal of attention in the harbor, where beautiful yachts are no rarity.
The _Arabella_ was intended by her builders for deep sea transit and as Patsy admiringly declared, "looked like a baby liner." While she was yacht-built in all her lines and fittings, she was far from being merely a pleasure craft, but had been designed by the elder Jones, the boy's father, to afford communication between the Island of Sangoa, in the lower South Seas, and the continent of America.
Sangoa is noted for its remarkable pearl fisheries, which were now owned and controlled entirely by this youth; but his father, an experienced man of affairs, had so thoroughly established the business of production and sale that little remained for his only son and heir to do, more than to invest the profits that steadily accrued and to care for the great fortune left him.

Whether he was doing this wisely or not no one--not even his closest friends--could tell.

But he was frank and friendly about everything else.
They went aboard the _Arabella_ and were received by that grim and grizzled old salt, Captain Carg, with the same wooden indifference he always exhibited.

But Patsy detected a slight twinkle in the shrewd gray eyes that made her feel they were welcome.

Carg, a seaman of vast experience, was wholly devoted to his young master.