"But you may go back there—wherever it is—and correct that dreadful mistake."
"In that case I should first be obliged to murder her present husband. Perhaps I omitted to tell you last night that she was very successfully married to a wealthy young coffee planter, just before I left Trujillo."
"Well, you wouldn't let a little thing like that stop you if you wanted to go back, would you?"
"Oh, no; certainly not. Don Jesus Maria Diego de Traviano would probably do the stopping act—with a soft-nosed bullet. He is a crack shot with a Mauser, as I happen to know."
"Poor you!" she murmured. Then, with the lightning-like change of front which had been one of her chief attractions—for me—in the old days: "Why don't you quarrel?—say something that I'll have to get mad and bitter at?"
I turned to face her and the sheer beauty of her shook me. Yet I did contrive to strike back, after a fashion.
"The voyage is yet young. There will doubtless be many quarrelsome occasions. Just now I don't think of anything more vital than this: if you are meaning to keep Jerry Dupuyster in hand, you are going the wrong way about it. If you seem to prefer my company to his, I have an idea that he would be just Quixotic enough to let you have your own way."
"Thanks, awfully," she laughed, but behind the laugh the slate-blue eyes were saying things out of a very different vocabulary. "That will do very nicely for a beginning. I suppose I shall have to give Jerry a few lessons in the proper reactions. Isn't that the tinkle-tinkle of the dinner gong?"
It was; and a few minutes later our ship's company, lacking only Miss Mehitable, who was still confined to her stateroom, gathered for the first time as a whole around the long table in the dining-saloon of the Andromeda. And in the seating I took blessed good care to have Beatrice Van Tromp on my left and motherly Mrs. Sanford for a bulwark on my right.