The girl slowly dragged her chin sidewise along her palms until she faced the Captain.
"Oh, you did! Has your experience with women taught you that is the best way to please them?"
Dan, now completely at sea, simply regarded her in silence. Virginia, inwardly triumphant, smiled.
"Now what can you do in four days to atone?"
"I might jump overboard."
"That would be romantic, but hardly—"
As the girl was speaking she turned her eyes to the water rushing past the hull, just as a dull, wallowing shape flashed by the bow, assuming form right under her eyes—a dark, soughing, coughing derelict, moving in the waves spinelessly, like a serpent; black, slimy, repulsive, with broken, hemp-littered masts and rusty chains clanking over the bow.
"Oh!" Virginia jumped back with a startled cry and looked fearfully at her companion. He was smiling, and intuitively she recognized that it was not a smile of amusement, but of sympathy, reassurance.
"Oh, wasn't it horrid!"
"Yes, it was not a pretty sight," replied Dan. "Derelicts never are. There are lots of them around here; they travel in currents, sometimes in short orbits, sometimes hundreds of miles in a straight line."