Newcomb slammed down the top of his portmanteau and rattled his keys.
Any ill success she may have had with the girl did not prevent Miss Greta from seizing every opportunity to work on the sympathies of the gentleman, above all, to ally herself with his international ideals. "You and I" was a phrase which Newcomb often caught as he strolled by; "from our point of view," was another. One of the impressions that was to remain longest, because so often renewed during the week at sea, was the group of which Grant remained the center; he lying spent, in his chair; Miss Ellis in another, finger in book and eyes lowered; while on the other side of him sat Miss Greta, suave, smiling, talking to Mr. Grant, but turning ingratiatingly every now and then to the girl, only to be met by that refusal of the eyes even more marked than the blankness of her silence.
Miss Greta did not continue to take this irresponsiveness well. Behind the continued and tireless effort her mood hardened, her resentment grew.
Newcomb could see that much, though she pretended with some success to make up for any disappointment, and more than make up, by turning the head of a lanky American youth.
The source of Mr. Craig Ashmole's attraction baffled Newcomb till he found out the young man's business: Mr. Ashmole was on his way to England to fill a telegraphy post. Two days out from New York one of the Leyden's wireless operators had taken to his bed; Mr. Ashmole was now installed as deputy assistant. The carroty and myopic youth was not above twenty-three and very keen about his job. He knew it well in its scientific, if not in its political, aspect; and he knew women not at all. Miss Greta's amused effort to fill up this hiatus in his education afforded no less amusement to certain lookers-on at the little comedy, as they thought it.
This was not the view of the one or two who knew the persistent fight made by the lady, that first day out, for the privilege of receiving wireless messages. Under the new rule no one had access to outside news except specially privileged official persons. It was doubtful if the rule held good after Miss Greta had publicly flouted more personable men in favor of the deputy-assistant operator. At carefully chosen times and, for the most part, in out-of-the-way corners she flirted outrageously with the absurd Ashmole. She dazed him, she dazzled him, she rattled him, she pumped him. She raised him to heaven, she reduced him to despair. She comforted him till he saw stars on the blackest night.
It was Saturday, and they had been six days at sea. But for the fact that the captain had gone ninety miles out of his course for some good reason of his own, they might, before the light of that day failed, have been sighting the round towers on the Irish coast.
The usual restlessness of the last hours of a voyage, when people alternately pack and write letters, or pack and feverishly cement new friendships and pack, was augmented by the fact of each passenger finding in his cabin late that afternoon a card on which appeared the sinister legend, "In case of need your boat is—" and a number followed. The very calmness of the information, its manner of conveyance, increased the eeriness of the warning.
Was it the lifeboat-card which those two, Grant and Miss Ellis, were discussing with that absorbed intensity?