He started, confusedly. "Don't?" he stammered. "What?"
"Don't think of—of what you were thinking. If you knew—oh, Cap'n Kendrick, if you could only realize how wicked I feel. Even when I said those dreadful things to you I didn't mean them. And now—— Oh, please forget them, if you can."
He drew a long breath. "I never saw any one like you," he declared. "How did you know what I was thinkin'? ... Of course I wasn't thinkin' it, but——"
She interrupted. "Of course you were, you mean," she said, with a faint smile. "It isn't hard to know what you think. You don't hide your thoughts very well, Cap'n Kendrick. They aren't the kind one needs to hide."
He stared at her in guilty amazement. "Good land!" he ejaculated, involuntarily. "Don't talk that way. What do you mean by that?"
"I mean that your thoughts are always straightforward and—well, honest, like yourself.... But we mustn't waste time. I don't know when we shall have another opportunity to be together like this, and there are some things I must say to you. Cap'n Kendrick, you know—you have heard the news?"
"News?... Oh, you mean about Elvira's inheritin' all that money?"
"That, of course. But that wasn't the news I meant. I mean about her eloping with—with that man."
Troubled even as Sears was at the sight of her evident distress, he could not but feel a thrill of satisfaction at the tone in which she referred to "that man." He nodded.
"I've heard it," he said. "I guess likely I was about the first Bayporter that did hear it. When did you hear?"