Nina shrugged her shoulders. It had come to the worst. He would not for an instant allow her to forget the hateful fetter that bound her to him. Their marriage, instead of being dropped, forgotten, no marriage at all, was to be made an excuse for the vilest tyranny. Oh, how angry she was! and she glared indignantly down at his collected face, for he had again approached and was saying something to her. She pulled herself together to hear it.
“I have ordered tea in the chart-room for you at eight bells. You will come, will you?”
“Not if it is to be a tea with you alone.”
He favoured her with a half-amused half-impatient shrug of his broad shoulders; then, after saying, “You flatter yourself, such a thought never came into my head,” he went away.
Not until the sweet-toned bell on the quarter-deck rang out eight strokes did he approach her again. “It is four o’clock now,” he said, lifting her down from her high seat.
They descended to the deck, and he told his servant, who was waiting for him, to go and ask Mrs. Grayley and Captain Eversleigh whether they would give him the pleasure of their company to tea in the chart-room. Then with a brief, “Are you satisfied?” he went up the steps and opened the door for her.
Nina followed him slowly and sat down on a stool in the corner.
“Will you have the kindness to take a seat farther away from me?” she said, when he turned his steps toward a stool next her own. But the request came too late; he had already seated himself.
“Nina,” he said, resting an arm on his knee, and deliberately stroking his heavy moustache while he bent forward to obtain a complete view of her, “to hear you talk at times, and to watch your actions, one would imagine that you hate me. I have been hoping that, since that ceremony two days ago, you would be different.”
“So I do hate you,” she cried, pushing his black coat sleeve aside. “I hate any man, who, forgetting that he is the natural protector of woman, becomes her persecutor.”