Light began to break upon him. Madge had not pressed upon them that day because she had discovered only him where she had expected to find Danton. Cleborne had really babbled of Danton and the Other Lady. Danton himself, in their talk on the beach at Kitty Hawk, had said that the Other had been in seclusion—hiding from his pursuit of her—in a farmhouse on the Eastern Shore.
He towered over Betty in sudden fury. “What! What is all this? Who are you? Who are you, I say?”
The smile died from the girl’s lips, and she shrank before his white face and fierce eyes.
Shame and rage so choked him that his words were almost incoherent, but they were the more terrible for that. She cowered away from him to the very limits of the gunwale.
“Oh, please!” she said. “Don’t! Don’t! Oh, please!”
The tenderness he had lately felt for her came over him in a wave as he looked down at the shrinking figure.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he said. “I lost my head. Don’t be afraid—it’s all over now. I beg your pardon.”
Without another word or look he turned and sought his room in the forecastle.
Half an hour later, as he lay staring into the darkness, he heard a muffled beat, as of a drum. Betty was playing her guitar in her room.
Gradually the drum-beat increased and quickened until it grew into a continuous roll, a throbbing cadence that thrilled through and through him. The roar of the wind and the mutter of the sea were in the shattering roll of the drum.