“‘A chief engineer,’ we call that size,” replied Captain Fordyce, dryly, pressing his handkerchief to his face, and looking as if he were about to go away.
“Can’t you stay for a little while?” asked Nina, balancing herself against a near boat, and glancing shyly up at him.
He smiled, turned his back to everything on the ship but her, and began to talk in a low tone. This was one of her elusive days. She had scarcely spoken a word to him since breakfast.
While he talked, Prince Charlie sat perched on the rail a little beyond him, in a lonely and disconsolate fashion. He knew that he was not wanted just now; and Nina smiled as she saw, over her husband’s shoulder, that he was making a pretence of throwing himself overboard.
Agile, sure-footed as a monkey, how did it happen that when she raised remonstrating eyes after a sentence that, coming from the sensible man before her, was nonsensical to the last degree, she saw that the boy’s play had turned to frightful earnest?
He had lost his balance. One glimpse she had of a pale, resolved face, two boyish, eager hands clutching wildly at the rail; then without a sound he dropped bravely into the ocean.
“Man overboard! Man overboard!” The piercing cry rang over the ship, and made her blood run cold in her veins. Then other voices took it up; and her husband, with his foolish sentence not yet cold on his lips, muttered a strangely mixed “Confound that boy!” and “God bless you, darling!” and was swinging himself over the side of the ship.
Nina clung to his arm with all her strength. “His mother—I promised her to look after him,” he said, putting her aside as easily as if she were a baby; and she wrung her hands as he escaped from her grasp.
Some one had thrown a life-buoy. He struck out for it as he reached the water; then with swift, steady strokes swam toward the dash of gold on the blue waters astern, where poor Prince Charlie was making a gallant struggle for life.
The officer of the watch was shouting directions in a calm, stentorian voice: “Stop and reverse! Lower the lee quarter bo-o-at!”