Somehow it all emphasized in Dan his aloofness. He heard Oddington address some jocular remark presumably to Miss Howland, for he caught her laughing reply. And the thought came, how eminently eligible Oddington was to sit at her side; how fitting that he should be there—wealthy, distinctly of her set, a good fellow at the university, and now a law partner in the practice which his hard-working father had prepared for him. For the first time, perhaps, in his life Dan felt himself humbled, and a great wave of bitterness flooded his mind.₀ And yet Miss Howland had been very kind to him. Ah, but that was not the point. He did not want persons to be kind; that suggested charity, or pity. No; he wanted exactly what he earned—what he could take with his bare hands and his bare soul. He wanted equality—or nothing; and if at the end of his struggle it had to be nothing, all right—but the end was not yet.
Toward nine o'clock the deck party began to break up. Some one had suggested bridge, and some opposed the suggestion. At the end of a laughing discussion Oddington and three others went to the smoking-room, while the rest dispersed in various directions. Dan, filled with his thoughts, was in the act of lighting his pipe, when the clicking of footfalls and the rustling of skirts sounded on the bridge steps. The next instant Virginia stood before him. The moonlight fell upon her, outlining the girl distinctly in her long, blue, double-breasted coat and the wealth of rippling dark hair flowing from under an English yachting cap. She was smiling.
"Do I intrude upon your sacred precincts?" she asked, "or am I welcome? I want to talk to you."
"You are welcome, Miss Howland," said Dan, knocking the fire from his pipe and stuffing the briar-wood into his pocket, at the same time glancing quickly toward the wheel where the mate and the quartermaster were busy over a slight alteration in course.
"I feared that incident at the table—Reggie Wotherspoon's behavior, I mean, might have upset you. Of course you know he meant nothing by it. We all understand how he hates to be beaten in an argument. Really he admires you—which is well for him, I can assure you."
Dan, deeply embarrassed, muttered something about understanding perfectly about Wotherspoon, and that he knew him to be a decent enough sort of chap.
"Do you know," went on the girl, "I myself was rather startled at first when you said that no man—that you could not tell whether you would flunk in time of danger. I was so glad when you made your reservation that in the past, at least, you had not shown the white feather. 'What the past has shown,'" she quoted, "'who can gainsay the future?' Oh, it was glorious," she exclaimed impulsively, "the night you stuck to our yacht until your own tug was battered to pieces! I suppose I have said that a hundred times; but it grows more thrilling every time I think of it."
She looked at him with open interest. His uniform became him well; the trim sack coat fitted his great, deep chest and almost abnormal shoulders snugly; and above were the square, smooth face, the steady gray eyes, and the red-gold hair; and the long, straight limbs supported a lithe, almost aggressive poise.
She started slightly forward.
"Have you ever thought how much we owe you? Oh, I have so often wished I could show you how much we appreciate all you did, in some way!"