“I command you to tell me, Captain Mayo.”
He could not comprehend her mood in the least and his demeanor showed it. Her command had a funny little ripple in it—as of laughter suppressed. There were queer quirks at the corners of her full, red lips.
“Now straighten up like your real self! I don't like to see you standing that way. You know I like to have all the folks on the yachts look at our captain when we go into a harbor! You didn't know it? Well, I do. Now what have you dared to do?”
He did straighten then. “I have dared to fall in love with you, Miss Marston. So have a lot of other fools, I suppose. But I am the worst of all. I am only a sailor. How I lost control of myself I don't know!”
“Not even now?” Still that unexplainable softness in her voice, that strange expression on her face. Being a sailor, he looked on this calm as being ominous presage of a storm.
“I am willing to have you report me to your father, Miss Marston. I will take my punishment. I will never offend you again.”
“You can control yourself after this, can you?”
“Yes, Miss Marston, absolutely.”
She hesitated; she smiled. She lowered her eyelids again and surveyed him with the satisfied tolerance a pretty woman can so easily extend when unconquerable ardor has prompted to rashness.
“Oh, you funny, prim Yankee!” she murmured. “You don't understand even now just why you did it!”