In the next instant, as the door closed quietly behind him, Peter was mighty glad that neither he nor she had yielded to impulse. He was not, in the light of the literal version, the owner of a wholly untarnished record, for he had given in to weakness, as most men do give into weakness.
But he was above temptation now, not because temptation was put behind him, but because he had had the strength to resist; and it was his full, deep desire to hold himself until that girl, far across the Pacific, who inspired the finest and best in him, should bear the name he bore.
It was a splendid thing, that feeling. It gave him courage and confidence, and took him quite light-heartedly, with head erect and shoulders back, out of the dreariest of his moments.
So, quick in a new and buoyant mood, Peter joggled the key in the lock of his stateroom door, slipped in, and was before long dreaming of a cottage built for two, of springtime in California, albeit snoring almost loud enough to drown out the throb of the Persian Gulf's old but still useful engines.
CHAPTER VII
Because of the fatigue which possessed his every muscle, fatigue springing from the arduous, the trying hours now past, Peter the Brazen was sleeping the slumber of the worthy, when, at a somewhat later hour in the night, some time before dawn crept out of the China Sea, a figure, lean and gray, flitted past his stateroom on the narrow orlop deck, peered in the darkened port-hole, and passed on.
Awakened by an instinct developed to a remarkable degree by his training of the past few months, Peter established himself upon one elbow and looked and listened, wondering what sounds might be abroad other than the peaceful churn of the engine.
Quite as intuitively he slipped his hand under the pillow and encountered the reassuring chill of the blued steel. Half withdrawing this excellent weapon, he shifted his eyes, alternately from the door to the port-hole, conscious of an imminent danger, a little stupefied by his recent plunge into the depths of sleep, but growing more widely awake, more alert and watchful, with the passage of each instant.
The port-hole loomed gray and empty, one edge of it licked by the yellow light of some not far distant deck-lamp. With his eye fastened upon this scimitar of golden light, Peter was soon to witness an unusual eclipse, a phenomenon which sent a shiver, an icy shiver, of genuine consternation up and down his backbone.