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."