“You seem to know a lot about him,'” said Lingard, enviously. “Why do you smile?” She continued to smile at him for a little while. The long brass tube over her shoulder shone like gold against the pale fairness of her bare head.—“At a thought,” she answered, preserving the low tone of the conversation into which they had fallen as if their words could have disturbed the self-absorption of Captain H. C. Jorgenson. “At the thought that for all my long acquaintance with Mr. d'Alcacer I don't know half as much about him as I know about you.”
“Ah, that's impossible,” contradicted Lingard. “Spaniard or no Spaniard, he is one of your kind.”
“Tarred with the same brush,” murmured Mrs. Travers, with only a half-amused irony. But Lingard continued:
“He was trying to make it up between me and your husband, wasn't he? I was too angry to pay much attention, but I liked him well enough. What pleased me most was the way in which he gave it up. That was done like a gentleman. Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Travers?”
“I quite understand.”
“Yes, you would,” he commented, simply. “But just then I was too angry to talk to anybody. And so I cleared out on board my own ship and stayed there, not knowing what to do and wishing you all at the bottom of the sea. Don't mistake me, Mrs. Travers; it's you, the people aft, that I wished at the bottom of the sea. I had nothing against the poor devils on board, They would have trusted me quick enough. So I fumed there till—till. . . .”
“Till nine o'clock or a little after,” suggested Mrs. Travers, impenetrably.
“No. Till I remembered you,” said Lingard with the utmost innocence.
“Do you mean to say that you forgot my existence so completely till then? You had spoken to me on board the yacht, you know.”
“Did I? I thought I did. What did I say?”