The Merrimac was carrying several hundred people out to the high seas; many nationalities, many grades of society, were represented; and Captain Fordyce sat with keen, observant eyes bent on this last assemblage of precious souls committed to his care. He seemed lonely, and even though she wished no dinner, Nina reflected that she might go and bear him company.
“What are you grumbling to yourself?” she asked, jauntily, as she terminated a walk down the crowded room by slipping into a seat beside him.
He pushed away his soup plate without replying.
“Tell me, I wish to know,” she said, commandingly.
“It was a thought, and thoughts are sacred things.”
“A man should have no secrets from his wife,” she murmured, with a severity that she knew would be pleasing to him.
Thus admonished, he said, softly: “The sweetly uncertain manners of girlhood, and yet the self-possession of a duchess.”
“Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present,” we read in the Rambler; and the gift laid before the girl came from one who gave to few, and that not often. In secret delight she dropped her eyes beneath the eloquent glance that went even further than the words, and murmured something about a paradox.
He smiled, then said, in a low voice, “Do you know what this is?”
“This?” she said, nodding toward a salt-cellar upon which he had concentrated his attention. “Yes, certainly. I was taught at school,—a small vessel for holding the chloride of sodium, a substance used as—”