"Please, miss, may we smoke?" said he who couldn't stand it.
Constance hesitated. Blithely unconscious that a whiff of mutiny had swept through the storm-tossed fold, she pondered the problem. She saw no harm in it.
"Yes," she said. "Smoke by all means. I will ask my father, and if it should be dangerous I will come back and let you know. In a few hours it will be daylight and if the sea falls he will come and open the door."
By sheer inspiration she had uttered the formula destined to annihilate the necromantic bluster of the hammering waves. Open the door! So this ponderous racket was a mere tidal trick, a bogey, which each passing minute would expose more thoroughly.
"All right, miss, an' Gawd bless yer," growled one who had not spoken hitherto. There was a chorus of approval. Constance gave a little gulp. The cultured and delicate lady lying in the bunk above had not spoken so.
"Indeed," she gasped, "God has blessed some of us this night."
Then she fled, further utterance failing her.
Nearer the sky, Brand tended the lamp and discussed matters with chief officer Emmett. The sailor, with the terse directness of his class, told how the Chinook had made an excellent voyage from New York until she ran into bad weather about four hundred miles west of the Lizard.
"It seems to me," he said, "as if we dropped onto the track of that hurricane after it had curved away to the norrard, and that the d——d thing swooped down on us again when we were abreast of the Bishop Light."
Brand nodded. This surmise agreed with his own theory of the storm, as indicated by the sea.