Among the people on the deck the quiet waiting which the traditions of the race have made second nature continued. We might have been passengers gathered at the entrance to a railway track. If a scared look haunted some faces, it was not more than might have been occasioned by the extreme lateness of a train.
The shells were still splashing, the ship was still driving onward under every pound of steam, when I looked again at the girl in the yashmak. It must not be understood that I had looked away from her for long. The period of our extreme peril did not in reality cover more than a few minutes. Like the crisis of a fever, it was slow in coming, but it passed quickly, though we needed some time to realize the fact.
But when I looked again at Regina Barry I found her as little disturbed as a woman could possibly have been in that special situation. Not to be hurled again into my arms, she held now to the hand-rail that runs along cabin walls; but she watched me rather than the ocean. I was her charge and the ocean was not. The blue-gray streak that had held her attention for a while was visible only when the turnings of the ship threw it into view; otherwise we had nothing to see on the starboard side except an infinitude of billows with curling white crests.
To resume something like the customary attitude of human beings toward each other I said, as casually as I could manage, “You came over here just after I did, didn’t you?”
Having purposely framed my sentence in just those words, it was some satisfaction to get the result I was playing for. It took all the aplomb—a rather shy aplomb—of which she was mistress to answer in a way that wouldn’t underscore my meaning.
“Possibly; but I don’t remember when you came over.”
Having given the date of my sailing, I added, “And you left with Evelyn a little more than three weeks later?”
“Since you know everything, you naturally know that.” She took on the old air of being at once smiling and defiant as she asked, “And has the fact any special significance?”
“That’s what I want to find out.” Before she could protest that there was no such significance I put the question, “How did you come to know her?”
“Is she so terribly difficult to know?”