"Go away back to bed," he finally ordered, "and keep to the poop till I give you leave to come forward again, d'ye hear?"
Slyne, too, stepped hastily aside as she passed him on her way aft again, and called after her some anxious advice as to taking better care of herself. She was glad to think that she would be free of him for the next few days, for always in the back of her mind was the fear of what he had told her before still more urgent cares had come to overshadow that for a time—that he had got Captain Dove to agree to give her to him as his wife. And, now that Reuben Yoxall was gone, she felt utterly forlorn and friendless.
The Olive Branch bored through the Strait of Gibraltar during the night, and after that Captain Dove effected sundry surprising changes in his ship's appearance. No one would have recognised the rakish Olive Branch in the clumsy looking craft with three bare pole-masts and a smokestack as high as a factory chimney which went lurching, with propellers awash, across the Gulf of Lyons. Even its name had been changed again, and the new paint carefully aged. And a tattered Norwegian flag lay ready at hand in the box beside the stubby pole at its taffrail.
No further case of fever had occurred in the interval, but he left Sallie isolated in her own end of the ship until the lights of Genoa showed white and clear in the distance. She was on deck, late though it was, watching them as they grew always clearer, when Slyne came aft for a moment to tell her that she was once more free of the ship.
"And isn't it glorious to get back to civilisation again?" he exclaimed, real gladness in his voice and his smiling eyes. "Think of the good times we're going to have now, Sallie! I can't stop to tell you all I've planned, but—I'll see you again very soon, eh? And meantime you can be getting ready to slip ashore with me early to-morrow. I thought these last few days would never end! I do believe I'd have jumped overboard but for you and the promise you made me."
He went off again, in a great hurry, before she could even deny having promised him anything. "Captain Dove wants me to fake up an old Bill of Health for him," he called back, and did not seem to hear her when she cried to him to wait.
Before she reached the quarter-deck, in her long oilskin coat, with a broad sou'wester to keep the dew from her hair, he had disappeared. And she did not care to follow him to the saloon below.
The steamer had stopped in the offing to pick up a pilot, and was already slinking in between the harbour head-lights to the quarantine anchorage. As soon as its rusty cable roared through the hawse-pipe, Captain Dove came down from the bridge, and Sallie stepped out from among the shadows to confront him, on a quick impulse.
"Is it true that you told Jasper Slyne I would marry him?" she asked directly, without any preface.
The old man shrugged his shoulders crossly. "Don't worry me just now, girl!" he growled, but paused for a moment before passing on.