Part 3

She had come and leaned close to him over the outspread chart, her breath on his cheek--so close to him that a roving tress of her hair flicked him. But because a sudden fire had leaped from the touch to his brain was no reason for the act by which he had just damned himself as a presumptuous brute.

For he, Boyd Mayo, captain of her father's yacht, a hireling, had just paid the same insulting courtship to Alma Marston that a sailor would proffer to an ogling girl on the street.

“I'll jump overboard,” he stammered at last. “I'll take myself out of your sight forever.”

The ominous silence persisted.

“I don't ask you to forgive me. It is not a thing which can be forgiven. Tell them I was insane--and jumped overboard. That will be the truth. I am a lunatic.”

He lurched through the door. In that desperate moment, in the whirl of his emotions, there seemed to be no other way out of his horrible predicament. He had grown to love the girl with all the consuming passion of his soul, realizing fully his blind folly at the same time. He had built no false hopes. As to speaking of that love--even betraying it by a glance--he had sheathed himself in the armor of reserved constraint; he had been sure that he sooner would have gone down on his hands and knees and bayed that silver moon from the deck of the yacht Olenia than do what he had just done.

“Captain Mayo! Wait!”

He waited without turning to look at her. Her voice was not steady, but he could not determine from the tone what her emotions were.

“Come back here!”

She was obliged to repeat the command with sharper authority before he obeyed. He lowered his eyes and stood before her, a voiceless suppliant.

“Why did you do that?” she asked. It was not the contemptuous demand which he had been fearing. Her voice was so low that it was almost a whisper.

“I don't know,” he confessed.

The violin sang on; the moon shone in at the door; two strokes, like golden globules of sound, from the ship's bell signaled nine o'clock. Only the rhythm of the engines, as soothing as a cat's purring, and the slow roll of the yacht and the murmuring of the parted waves revealed that the Olenia was on her way through the night.

“I don't know,” he repeated. “It doesn't excuse me to say that I could not help it.”

And he understood women so little that he did not realize that he was making the ages-old plea which has softened feminine rancor ever since the Sabine women were borne away in their captors' arms and forgave their captors.

She stared at him, making once more a maiden's swift appraisal of this young man who had offered himself so humbly as a sacrifice. His brown hands were crossed in front of him and clutched convulsively his white cap. The cap and the linen above the collar of his uniform coat brought out to the full the hue of his manly tan. The red flush of his shocked contrition touched his cheeks, and, all in all, whatever the daughter of Julius Marston, Wall Street priest of high finance, may have thought of his effrontery, the melting look she gave him from under lowered eyelids indicated her appreciation of his outward excellencies.

“I suppose you are thoroughly and properly ashamed of what you have done!”

“I am ashamed--so ashamed that I shall never dare to raise my eyes to you again. I will do what I promised. I will jump overboard.”

“Captain Mayo, look at me!”

When he obeyed, with the demeanor of a whipped hound, his perturbation would not allow him to show as much appreciation of her as she had displayed in the secret study of him, which she now promptly concealed. He surveyed her wistfully, with fear. And a maiden, after she has understood that she has obtained mastery over brawn and soul, does not care to be looked at as if she were Medusa.

She stole a side-glance at her face in one of the mirrors, and then tucked into place a vagrant lock of hair with a shapely finger, thereby suggesting, had there been a cynical observer present, that Miss Alma Marston never allowed any situation, no matter how crucial, to take her attention wholly from herself.

There was no mistaking it--had that cynical observer been there, he would have noted that she pouted slightly when Mayo declared his unutterable shame.

“You will never get over that shame, will you?”

And Captain Mayo, feverishly anxious to show that he understood the enormity of his offense, and desiring to offer pledge for the future, declared that his shame would never lessen.

Her dark eyes sparkled; whether there was mischief mingled with resentment, or whether the resentment quite supplanted all other emotions, might have been a difficult problem for the cynic. But when she tilted her chin and stared the offender full in the eyes, propping her plump little hands in the side-pockets of her white reefer, Captain Mayo, like a man hit by a cudgel, was struck with the sudden and bewildering knowledge that he did not know much about women, for she asked, with a quizzical drawl, “Just what is there about me, dear captain, to inspire that everlasting regret which seems to be troubling you so much?”

Even then he did not grasp the full import of her provocative question. “It isn't you. I'm the one who is wholly to blame,” he stammered. “I have dared to--But no matter. I know my place. I'll show you I know it.”

“You dared to--What have you dared to do--besides what you just did?”

“I cannot tell you, Miss Marston. I don't propose to insult you again.”