His fingers closed round her arm, and he led her, unconscious of a strength that almost lifted her from her feet, toward an open door, where a lamp burnt dimly within. It smelt abominably of an untrimmed wick, Juliette thought, and the next minute she was kissing her father, who lay full length on a locker in the little cabin.
She asked him a hundred questions, and waited for few of the answers. Indeed, she supplied most of them herself; for she was very quick and gay.
“I see,” she cried, “that your foot has been tied up by a sailor. He has tried to mend it as if it were a broken spar. I suppose that was the Captain who brought me to you, and then ran away again, as soon as he could. Yes; I have Marie with me. She is telling them to be careful with the luggage. I can hear her. I am so glad we had a case of fever at the school. It was a lay sister, a stupid woman. But how lucky that I should be at home just when you wanted me!”
She stood upright again, after deftly loosening the bandage round her father’s ankle, and looked at him and laughed.
“Poor, dear old papa,” she said. “One sees that you want some one to take care of you. And this cabin—oh! mon Dieu! how bare and uncomfortable! I suppose men have to go to sea alone because they can persuade no woman to go with them.”
She pounced upon her father again, and arranged afresh the cushions behind his back, with a little air of patronage and protection. Her back was turned toward the door, when some one came in, but she heard the approaching steps and looked quickly round the cabin walls.
“Heavens!” she exclaimed, in a gay whisper. “No looking-glass! One sees that it is only men who live here.”
And she turned, with smiling eyes and a hand upraised to her disordered hair, to note the new-comer. It was Dormer Colville, who laid aside his waterproof as he came and greeted her as an old friend. He had, indeed, known her since her early childhood, and had always succeeded in keeping pace with her, even in the rapid changes of her last year at school.
“Here is an adventure,” he said, shaking hands. “But I can see that you have taken no harm, and have not even been afraid. For us, it is a pleasant surprise.”
He glanced at her with a smiling approbation, not without a delicate suggestion of admiration, such as he might well permit himself, and she might now even consider her due. He was only keeping pace.