“In that instant I was enormously puzzled. I had seen a riddle set and staged before my eyes and I had no answer to it. I do not remember the men pulling the lifeboat over to the Western Pacific—I recall nothing but the darkness of that tremendous and tragic problem and the incessant pressure of Sheila’s fingers into my arm. But when we reached the liner’s deck, I supporting Sheila, I saw a woman standing in a little recess of the deckhouse. It was Kitty Melrose. She was as lovely and witching as ever, her eyes shining, her lips parted gently.
“How do women know? I cannot tell. But Sheila caught sight of her and thrust through the crowd to her and peered into her beautiful and shining eyes with a kind of terror. Kitty’s expression never changed; she stood there with pearls of spray in her hair and a look of childlike, glorious amazement on her face, which was turned toward the dreary spot where a few bits of wreckage showed above the grave of the Shearwater. And do you know what Sheila said?”
Gorham laid his pipe aside and lowered his eyes.
“She said, quite simply, ‘Nobody would ever tell me.’”
He stopped and picked up his pipe again.
“At that moment the skipper of the Western Pacific came bustling along.
“‘Where is Captain Owen?’ he bawled.
“The chief officer of the Shearwater answered that question: ‘With his ship,’ he said in an ugly, injured tone.
“I assure you that that captain, faultlessly dressed, quite magnificent and self-confident, now that his own vessel was safe, hadn’t a word to say. The Shearwater’s engineer turned on him with a snarling, ‘Captain Owen ran his own ship under to save yours.’
“But, while that was the bald truth, I felt no interest in the affair on that side. I was looking at Kitty Melrose. Sheila’s queer, plaintive, ‘Nobody would ever tell me,’ sounded in my ears. In my pocket was that message that Harry had wirelessed across the night before. What would Kitty say? Nothing, of course. She stood remote and fine and composed in a little space surrounded by anxious and curious and respectful men and women. Yet I saw in her gaze, still fixed on the spot amid the tumbling seas where Harry Owen had gone to his death, something”—Gorham fumbled around a bit, scratched a match, blew it out, glanced at me with a gloomy eye, finished his sentence in a voice suddenly husky—“something Harry must have dreamed of seeing.”