"I should like to win," said he, after a pause, "particularly if you're looking on!"
"Don't say me," she murmured, adding in a louder and merrier voice, "You cannot deny you're devoted to Blanche, and I dare say, if the truth were known, she has made you a jacket and cap of her own colours, worked with her own hands."
"I like her very much," he answered frankly. "It's partly on her account I want to land this race. She's so fond of the mare, you know. Not but what I've gone a cracker on it myself; and if it don't come off, there'll be a general break-up! But I beg your pardon, I don't see why that should interest you."
"Don't you?" said she earnestly. "Then you're as blind as a bat. Everything interests me that concerns people I like."
"Does that mean you like me?" asked Daisy with a saucy smile, enhanced by a prolonged lurch of the steamer, and the blow of a wave on her quarter, that drenched them both in a shower of spray.
She was silent while he wrung the wet from her cloak and hood, but when he had wrapped her up once more, and readjusted her cushions, she looked gravely in his face.
"It's an odd question, Mr. Walters," said she, "but I'm not afraid to answer it, and I always speak the truth. Yes, I do like you—on Blanche's account. I think you've a pretty good head, and a very good heart, with many other qualities I admire, all of which seem rather thrown away."
Daisy was the least conceited of men, but who could resist such subtle flattery as this? For a moment he wished the Emerald Isle sunk in the sea, and no nearer termination to their voyage than the coast of Anticosti, or Newfoundland. Alas! the Hill of Howth stood high on the starboard quarter, the Wicklow mountains had risen in all their beauty of colour and majesty of outline, grand, soft, seductive, robed in russet and purple, here veiled in mist, there golden in sunshine, and streaked at intervals with faint white lines of smoke.
"I'm glad you like me," said he simply. "But how do you mean you think I'm thrown away?"