"Don't send that!" the girl urged. She added reasons in whose syllabling Napier heard Julian's voice. Oh, he had well indoctrinated her! As Napier listened, obviously unmoved, there came into Nan's earnestness a note that gave him more uneasiness than her "opinions"—a note of anxiety, a note of something very like panic. "You can't send that! It—it might make such trouble, not only—not to people you call your enemies." She caught herself up. "As Julian says, 'The reactions from that kind of tyranny—'"
Napier said quietly he must accept the reactions.
"But you can't!" she repeated. "It's the greatest mercy you've showed it to me. Oh, Gavan, you don't want to make trouble between England and America? You will if you send in that report. I do beg you—"
Napier had seldom known more difficult moments than those that followed. As she stood beside him on the saloon-deck near the companionway-door, he glanced at the mail-box near the purser's window. Its open brass mouth seemed to bray a warning: "If you don't post that letter now, you never will." Napier stepped inside, and dropped the envelope through the slit.
Nan sat down on a folding-stool near the ship's railing. Napier went back and stood silent by her for a moment. Then he said:
"Give me what credit you can. I don't remember ever doing anything harder than that."
To his surprise, instead of reproaching him or punishing him with silence or with tears, "What do you expect your Government will do?" she said.
"Oh, I don't know." He didn't try to keep the touch of impatience out of his voice. "Regulate the traffic a little better, perhaps." He would have left it at that but for a trifling occurrence. The head of the German officer whom they had left a few minutes before on the upper deck appeared just then out of an open port in the dining-saloon. For the merest instant it was there, only to be withdrawn. And why, pray, shouldn't a man of any race look out at the sea from a public window? even, come to that, glance out at a pretty girl? "People may as well know," Napier said, "that the British Government has come to a point where it will be obliged to exercise its censorship openly and thoroughly instead of—" He frowned in the direction where the offending head had been. "I doubt if these fellows on board here have even been asked to make a declaration, let alone been examined."
"Why should they be examined?" The voice beside him rose indignant. "On the open sea! bound for a neutral country!"
He looked at her with different eyes. "The British port was the proper place," he said. "And perhaps people were examined. You know better than I."