“Oh, but look here! If she would marry me—”
“Marry you?” cried Miss Torrance. “What preposterous nonsense is this, when you haven’t spoken half a dozen words to each other?”
“I can’t help it,” said he, terribly downcast, but resolute. “That’s the way it is with me; and if she even seemed to—to be beginning to like me, I’d give up the sea.”
Miss Torrance smiled—not a trustful smile.
“I mean it!” said he. “I have to make this trip, but when I come back, I’ll stay. I promised, long ago, that if ever I met a girl I wanted to marry, I’d swallow the anchor.”
“Indeed!” said Miss Torrance.
Like all innocent persons who wish to be convincing, Mr. Martin added details.
“The best friend I ever had made me promise that,” he went on. “He’d had a hard lesson when he tried to mix the two—falling in love and going to sea, I mean. He lost his ticket and his girl both.”
“Indeed!” said Miss Torrance again. “Very interesting, I’m sure!” The poor young man believed that she meant that.
“Yes,” he said, “it is an interesting story. This chap—I’ll call him Smith, if you don’t mind, because naturally he wouldn’t like to be named. It happened some time ago—eighteen or twenty years ago, and this chap was third officer on a cargo steamer running between London and Antwerp. Well, one trip he met a girl in London, and he—well, you know, he liked her, and she seemed to like him. He told her when he’d be likely to dock again, and she said that that was her birthday, and that she wanted him to come to a little dance she was having. Well, of course, he got her a present. He pretty well broke himself to get her something he thought she’d like, and I suppose he thought about her a good deal. A fellow would, you know, at night, on watch, you know, and so on. Well, they got in the morning of the very day he’d said—docked at Tilbury—and then the old man told him he needn’t expect to get ashore this trip. The first was married and lived in London, and the second was signing off, so Smith would have to stay on board. Of course he couldn’t say anything, but it hit him pretty hard. Look here, Miss Torrance, does this bore you?”