“Why don’t you come on deck, Marie-Jeanne? Do stop work now. It’s almost lunch time.”
Marie-Jeanne extinguished the alcohol lamp and prepared to follow her friend aloft.
“I never had a friend before, Mary,” she exclaimed, locking her arm shyly into the other’s.
On deck a fresh wind had sprung up and every little wave wore a whitecap. The spray blew into their faces, tossed their loose locks and blew their skirts out like balloons. A game of “catcher” was going on, and the two girls were greeted with cries of joyous laughter and shouts of merriment. Telemac Kalisch was “old man” and he was chasing the others. Little Arthur was in the game and his shrill cries rang above the others’. He was a nimble child and had just slipped through Telemac’s hands, when a man rushed from the salon and hurried down the deck. He had a thin, cadaverous face with a beaked nose, and he wore enormous horn spectacles. His chin was slightly receding and he had weak, pale eyes.
He paused in front of Billie, who happened to be running hand in hand with Arthur at the moment.
“I beg your pardon,” he said angrily, “but are you aware that you happen to be endangering the life of a human being by your mad behavior?”
Billie flushed hotly.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“Do you wish to be a murderess, young woman?” he exclaimed in a furious voice. “Has it not been made sufficiently clear to you that a certain person who shall be nameless is the victim of a terrible disease which affects his heart, and one dash up and down this deck might do him forever?”
Billie was silent. She had never been nearer bursting into tears in her life than at that moment, and not for worlds would she have trusted her voice before this brutal Englishman.