Iris felt the thrill that shook him. She could not see his face, but she knew that his blue eyes were shining like bright steel. She was horrified at the thought of red war being so near, yet she was proud of her lover. At these mortal crises, the woman demands courage in the man.
"Oh!" she gasped, and clung to him more tightly.
Under such circumstances it was only to be expected that his arm would clasp her round the waist; Disraeli's famous epigram was coined for diplomacy, not for love-making.
Hozier strained his eyes through the gloom to try and discover the effect of the cannonade on the gunboat. He was quickly alive to the significance of the answering broadside. Then the black hull grew dim and vanished. His sailor's sympathies went with the escaping ship.
"She has got away! I am jolly glad of it," he cried. "It was a dirty trick to open fire on her in that fashion. Just how they served the Andromeda, the hounds, only we had never a gun to tickle them up in return."
"Do you think that many of the poor creatures have been killed?" asked Iris tremulously. The din of ordnance and bursting shells had ceased as suddenly as it began. Lights appeared in nearly every house. Shouting men were running along the neighboring wharf. Maceio, never a heavy sleeper in bulk, dreamed for a second of earthquakes, leaped out of bed, and ran into the streets in the negligent costume which the Italians describe by the delightful word, confidenza.
"I don't suppose so," Hozier reassured her. "If the artillery had made good practice at that short range the gunboat must have sunk at her moorings. Her men naturally couldn't miss the town. There was a rare old rattle among the crockery behind the soldiers. Did you hear it? I wonder what went over?"
He was as excited as a schoolboy, almost jubilant. Poor Iris! Though she was now a veteran in scenes of death and disaster, she realized that fate had erred in choosing her as a heroine.
Coke and Watts drew near.
"Dom Wot's-'is-name wasn't long in gettin' busy," chuckled Coke. "Gev' her a dose of the Andromeda's physic, eh? I'm sorry the blighters managed to 'ook it."