"Captain Petersen wishes to know if Your Highness will have luncheon served in your state-room, or if you will eat in the saloon. There are no other passengers beside your party and this young lady."
"The saloon, by all means, Otto, and tell the Captain I hope he will join us, as well as Mademoiselle, if she will do us the honour!"—He looked at Ragna who bowed.
Count Angelescu also bowed and withdrew—he had bowed to Ragna, bringing his heels together with a click, when his Prince presented him, but had seemed to give her no further attention. In reality he had observed her closely and her frank expression and fresh youthfulness pleased him. Ragna's impression of him was equally favourable; she liked his bronzed soldierly face, with the grave eyes and the firm mouth under the dark moustache. He must be thirty or over, she thought, the Prince could not be more than twenty-four or five.
The sailors had lowered the gang-plank and were casting off the hawsers which held the steamer to the wharf. A wheezy donkey-engine was lowering boxes and bales through the forward hatch; on the river side a small puffing tug was slowly warping the Norje into midstream. Ragna and the Prince could hear Captain Petersen on the bridge, now calling orders through the tube to the engine room, now bawling through his speaking-trumpet. His round face looked like an overgrown peony and Ragna said so, to her companion's amusement.
"Is that the botany they teach you in Paris?" he asked.
"Oh," she answered, laughing gayly, "Paris is a place where one learns many things!"
"Even in a Convent?"
"Even in a Convent."
He shot a stealthy glance at her from under dropped lids—the girl was thoroughly innocent, there could be no doubt as to that. A smile twitched his moustache—the things Paris had taught him were not subjects usually included in the curriculum of a girls' school, and the piquancy of the contrast between his experience of la Villa Lumière and that of Ragna amused him. He stood idly watching her—her face interested him, not from its prettiness alone—she was at the same time more and less than pretty. It was no doll's face, the cheek-bones were too high and prominent for the canons of perfect beauty, the mouth too large and the forehead too high, but there was an indescribable charm he did not seek to analyse—enough that it should be perceptible. He felt instinctively that though childlike in her mind Ragna was no fool, and that it would amuse him to draw her out. So he led her on to express her opinions on various subjects grave and gay, such as came up in their desultory conversation.
The announcement of luncheon, by means of a cracked gong, was no interruption for the Captain excused himself on the ground that his presence was required on the bridge, and Count Angelescu barely joined in the conversation from time to time in response to a direct appeal from the Prince or from Ragna.