Rose coloured on hearing the captain's bantering tone, as she threw a shawl over her head and shoulders, took the doctor's ready arm, and hastened up the companion-stair.
Ethel smiled sadly at her joyous and girlish sister, for she had seen how the intimacy between the young doctor and Rose had been ripening; and she wondered, or speculated on, how they would separate when the tedious voyage was over. Then she thought of Morley Ashton, and the fatal blight that had fallen so awfully and mysteriously upon her own first love.
"Miss Basset," said Hawkshaw, rising, "would you wish—
"To go on deck? Oh, no, thank you," said she hurriedly, anticipating and replying to his offer without looking up from "I Promessi Sposi."
Hawkshaw seated himself again, and bit his lip, while that malignant gleam which filled his eyes at times shot from them covertly and unseen.
He made one other effort to engage her in conversation, by saying, in a low voice, as he stooped over her:
"Your sad smiles, Ethel, go straight to my heart, with an effect, believe me, that is cruel—killing!"
"Why! it seems that 'I can smile, and murder while I smile,' as Shakespeare says. Is it so?"
"Bantering—bantering still—even here, when on the verge of destruction, perhaps!" muttered Hawkshaw, as he drew back with another fierce but covert gleam in his stealthy eyes, and Ethel never lifted hers again from her book, until a noise on deck aroused her.
Rose clung closely and affectionately to the doctor's arm, as they traversed the quarter-deck towards the taffrail, and turned to look at the ship, at the sky overhead, through which the wild black scud was driving, and on the mysterious world of water and of darkness, through which she was careering under a press of canvas.