“Take her below, Grey, to her cabin. I’ll need you in five minutes. And, mind you, look sharp!”
I know when to obey a man—and silently.
The girl still clung to me, but her terror came not so much from the vessel’s condition as it sprang from consternation at the remarkable change in her father.
But she didn’t say a word except to thank me when I left her at her stateroom door.
“I’m all right now, Mr. Grey,” she said quietly, though the haunt of some indefinite fear still showed in those wonderful eyes of hers. “You’d better get back to deck. He may need you.”
And the way she said that pronoun told where the trouble lay.
Even in the short interval I had been below deck, the weather had taken on a change for the better. A quick[Pg 48] squall is almost always a short one, bearing out the old adage: “Short warning, soon past.”
But, though the wind had fallen, we again faced that clammy nuisance, fog. For, as though it had but lifted to give us the warning Stroth did not heed, the mist once more settled its gloomy mantle over us—almost in disgust, I was pleased to fancy.
The vessel still was rolling to the trough, but a certain sort of order was beginning to show out of the chaos of the minutes preceding.
Stroth caught sight of me, and cried: