“Did you?” she said, confusedly, “I must have been dreaming.”
“Yes, you were asleep. You sat thinking for a long time, then your eyes closed, and you dropped off.”
She glanced sharply at him. He was about to enter upon his favourite topic of conversation, namely, herself, and, anxious to get him off such dangerous ground, she pointed beyond him, and said, hurriedly, “I love the sea when it looks like that.”
The curtains were looped back, and the doorway framed for them a charming picture,—a stretch of the deepest, darkest, bluest sea imaginable, and over it a moon new and radiant, set in a sky studded with brightly twinkling stars. As Captain Fordyce turned and looked over his shoulder, a small cloud dragged its white fleece across the silver crescent.
“See what it is to have an evil eye,” he said, half aloud; “at one glance from me the scene changes.”
Nina knew little of the dark side of his nature, and, touched by the suppressed bitterness of his tone, she felt it incumbent on her to say something to comfort him.
“You have not an evil eye, ’Steban. You have a good eye, and people like you,—your sailors, too.”
He suddenly turned his gaze from the starry sky to her. “Who told you that?”
“Oh, some one,” she replied, evasively.
“That old gossip of a stewardess?”