"Oh, Captain Latham! We—we can't do it. My name—somebody will some time be sure to hear about me, and the dreadful secret will come out."
"No, it won't," said Tunis doggedly. "There will be no secret, not such as you mean, to come out."
She gazed upon him in open-eyed surprise, her lips parted, her face aglow.
"You mean—"
"We'll leave Sheila Macklin sitting on this bench, if you will agree. She need never be traced from this point. Let her drop out of the ken of the whole world that knew her. The name can only bring you harm; it has brought you harm. Through it you are threatened with trouble, with disaster. Your whole future is menaced through that name and the stain upon it."
She looked at him still, scarcely breathing. Latham did not realize the power he held over this girl at the moment. He was to her a living embodiment of the All Good. Almost any suggestion, no matter how reckless, he might have made, would have found an echo in her heart and the will to do it.
To few is vouchsafed that knowledge which makes all clear before the mental vision. Tunis Latham's perspicacity did not compass this thing. He did not grasp the psychological moment, as we moderns call it, and consummate there and then the only reasonable and righteous plan that it was given him to complete.
The captain of the Seamew was a young man very much in love. He did not question this fact at all. But in his wildest imaginings he could never have believed that the girl beside him on this bench returned his passion, that she would even listen to his protestations of affection. Not for a long time, at least.
Nor had he ever considered marriage as possible in any case when there was not love on both sides. Although he commiserated Sheila Macklin's situation most deeply, he could not dream of those depths of despair into which the girl's heart had sunk before he came upon the scene of action. He did not understand that she was at that bitterly desperate point where she would grasp at any means of rescue which promised respectability.
He almost feared to put before her the proposition he did have in his mind. In the dusk, even, those violet eyes seemed to look to the very bottom of his soul. Fortunate for him that its clarity was visible to the girl at that moment.