"Oh! I say."
"Perfectly true, and I had it out of her by trailing her half-dead husband after me all over the ship, until he hadn't a leg to stand on; and I put a rose in his buttonhole under her very eyes. I've been ashamed of it ever since, but when a girl's got to fight her own battles, what would you have?"
"There should be always some one glad to fight for you," he said, suddenly fired by her proud young beauty in distress.
They had, while speaking, walked down to the dividing rail that cuts off the promenaders of the second cabin from the first-class decks, and for some moments tarried there, Clandonald with his back to it, Miss Winstanley facing him. As the Englishman spoke these unpremeditated words of warm sympathy, for the second time that day there had come into the girl's artless face an expression she certainly had no idea of revealing. It caused Clandonald to pull himself up with a jerk, and stay the vague, rather affectionate, words he had been on the point of uttering, without, perhaps, meaning to have too much importance attached to them. And it was further reflected in the shining green eyes of a second-class passenger in shabby black, standing near by the barrier, wearing a veil of black gauze with large coquettish velvet dots that half concealed her undulated locks of unreasonably ruddy hair!
It was not the first time the green gleam of those watchful eyes had been fixed upon Clandonald and his companions. He had, in fact, been under their close observation whenever practicable since leaving New York harbor, in the course of their owner's predatory walks, as she alternately drew near and receded with graceful feline tread, seeming to look at nothing, yet forever alert where the good-looking, lazy young Englishman was concerned.
The youthful steward who distends himself for the public good by blowing the bugle for lunch was, on this occasion, the agent of Providence to relieve a strained situation. Clandonald could not, in the face of such a blast, go on with his implied offer of championship. The second-cabin passenger glided swiftly back across her little bridge, and was seen no more. Miss Winstanley, announcing herself half-starved, went to her stateroom to wash her hands. And his lordship, to calm his feelings, partook of a certain small, specially reviving, bitter-sweet draught, which his servant had acquired the gentle art of mixing, during their sojourn in San Francisco. On the way into the dining-room, he found Mariol just ahead of him, amid a congerie of stewards hurrying to and from their pantries with their arms full of crockery, and in an atmosphere tinctured with out-rushing odors of cauliflower and curried rice, gave his friend a word of counsel.
"I have been talking with Miss Winstanley," he said. "The truth is, Mariol, the poor girl is being pecked by all these women, until it hurts. You have some friendship, perhaps some influence, with Miss Carstairs. Persuade her to be generous, and take the outsider in. It will cost her nothing, and I'm hanged if I understand why she's been such an icicle, as it is."
"Did Miss Winstanley invite your intercession?" asked Mariol, dodging back from contact with an inclined plane of mutton broth, in a tilting china plate marked with the White Star's emblem, borne aloft by a deeply apologetic steward.
"No. Absolutely no. She'd fight to the last ditch before she'd give in to them. But I have an ulterior motive. I want to ask the two young women with my dear old aunt, Lady Campstown, to play propriety, to come down with you to Beaumanoir some day next week, and if they hardly speak——"
"Under these circumstances, I will engage to attempt the impossible, though whether I achieve it is quite another story. I, too, have been at a loss to fathom Miss Carstairs' apparent intention to ignore our pretty table-mate. I had fancied her too sure of her own position to care about a mere difference in social status. I have found her perfectly amiable. But if, by any chance, the discussion of Miss Winstanley comes up, there is an immediate stiffening of the muscles of the neck and chin, the clear eyes become veiled, and she turns the subject. I could almost fancy, but that they never met before, there was some personal animus between them."