The girl gazed intently at his square-cut, bronzed face. Then she looked straight into his steel-gray eyes, peering hard ahead from under the flat peak of a cap he had picked up on the bridge.
"Yes," she said, as though speaking to herself, "I think I know." Then she started with an involuntary gesture.
"Haven't I seen you somewhere before, Captain Merrithew? Yes, yes, I have. Where could it have been? Do you recall?"
"Yes," was the simple reply. "I recall. It was about two years ago, at Norfolk, when you were at the coal docks on this yacht."
Virginia flushed eagerly and was about to say something, when some flashing thought, perhaps a realizing sense of their relative positions, closed her lips. "I remember very clearly now." She spoke quietly, then she closed her eyes for a second; when she opened them they were stern and hard.
"Captain Merrithew," she said, as though to hasten from the subject, "I know we are in danger. Your silence has said as much. Yet the yacht seems to be going finely—"
Dan made no reply.
"Do you think I am a coward? Is that the reason you are silent?"
Dan made no attempt to conceal his annoyance.
"Well, Miss Howland, if you are not a coward, if you can keep what you know to yourself, listen: We're taking in a little water. It's a race between the yacht and the leak; the yacht ought to win out. Now you know as much as I do."